Kai Cenat broke Twitch’s streaming records, but Twitch itself has plateaued

After streaming on the platform 24 hours a day for 30 days, content creator Kai Cenat broke the record for the most subscribers on Twitch, hitting 727,700 by the end of November… and generating an estimated $3.6 million in revenue in the process, per CNBC.

The “subathon” — a livestreaming event where every new subscription or donation extends the duration of the stream — concluded on November 30 after featuring celebrity guests like Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart, as well as hours upon hours of its star, uninterrupted even when sleeping. 

Twitch execs will be celebrating, too: the company typically takes a 50% cut of subscriber revenues (though this share is reduced to 30%-40% for top creators). Cenat’s achievements will be good news for the Amazon-owned company, which remains unprofitable despite its acquisition by the tech giant a decade ago.

The fact that Twitch remains in the red is somewhat surprising, considering how much the platform boomed during the pandemic. Total hours watched on the platform surged a whopping 47% in a month in April 2020 off the back of bedroom-bound gamers, vloggers, and DJs. Despite its online clout, Twitch has struggled to bring in enough revenue to cover its costs, causing difficulties in incentivizing its creators and leading to the company infamously withdrawing from South Korea at the start of the year due to expensive network fees.

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