Twitch Streamer Kai Cenat, Who Just Broke A World Record For Subs On The Platform, Said He Turned Down $60 MILLION To Switch To Their Biggest Competitor Kick
It's not lost on me that likely a majority of you who are clicking this blog have absolutely no idea what any of this means, but saw in the headline that a live streamer was offered $60 million and you're wondering where you went wrong in life. I'm going to try to dumb this down for you and keep it short and sweet, simply because there's no other way you'll give more than a few minutes of thought to this before you go and hand your kid an Xbox controller and tell him to hop on the game or something.
Kai Cenat is essentially the biggest streamer on the planet and averages over 100,000 viewers anytime he's live. He's doing a month-long "subathon", which in so many words is a 24/7 stream for 30 days in an attempt to gain the most "subs", or $5 subscriptions. He used to have the record before a Vtuber, which I'm still not really sure what that is, ended up taking it a month ago and he immediately planned another subathon. Here's what Ironmouse looks like in case you're curious of the lore:
Anyway, Kai has been live for about 11 days and ended up surpassing the 326,252 subscribers required for the world record. He's got until the end of the month to keep building on that number, and I'd be shocked if he ended up anywhere under 500,000. I'm no mathematician, but a million seems somewhat possible if he keeps on the same pace. Doing simple numbers, let's say he ends up with 500,000. That generates $2,500,000, 20% of which he says is going to build a school in Nigeria. Well done.
So that's what he's doing on the live stream, but the true revealing number was that after he broke the record, he explained a story about Twitch's (who is owned by Amazon) number one rival in Kick. He did one of these subathons a year ago, and apparently Kick offered him $60 MILLION to stream HALF of the 30 days on their platform and then move over to their platform for what I assume is a single year. For reference, the #1 paid player in the NBA Steph Curry earns about $55.75 million a year. The NFL? Dak's averaging $60 million.
If you take nothing else from this blog, take the fact that he was offered a higher salary than any athlete in the entire country and turned it down to remain loyal to Twitch and Amazon. Kai said he believes God gave him the sign to decline it and that the money would come regardless. One of their co-founders said this number wasn't true, so in best journalistic integrity practice, here's that clip:
Whether you believe the co-founder or Kai, streamers earning even $22 million for a partially non-exclusive contract (meaning he'd still be allowed to stream on Twitch) is bananaland as Portnoy would say. I'm off to go figure out how to become a streamer myself.
P.S. Remember when Smitty went 1-1058 in Fortnite and got one of our highest viewed videos ever trying to get win #2?