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Why one of Twitch’s top streamers left the platform
Happy Friday. ‘Tis the season for year-end platform performance charts—with Spotify, Apple, and YouTube all releasing theirs this week. While I love talking about the top performers around the globe, I’ll be staying quiet about my personal Spotify Wrapped results. That data could lose me friendships, and will never see the light of day.
In Today’s Issue 💬
→ A leading gaming creator changes platforms
→ What Spotify Wrapped means for creators
→ How one Web3 platform gives creators more ownership
Why Ludwig Ahgren Left Twitch for YouTube Gaming
Source: Ludwig Ahgren
Earlier this week YouTube Gaming (YTG) signed “the golden boy of Twitch”, Ludwig Ahgren, to stream exclusively on their platform.
“YouTube offered me more than Twitch,” Ahgren explained in a video on his channel detailing his reasons for leaving.
After receiving the offer, Ahgren was inclined to stay with Twitch at first, noting that when he called the team at YTG to decline their offer, he found they were more inclined to work around his goals.
Similar to Twitch, Ahgren will make recurring revenue from his paying subscribers in the form of YouTube memberships. Additionally, exclusivity deals like this one will provide him with the financial stability to pursue non-gaming content, which he described as a passion of his and what makes him the “most proud”.
The initial announcement was made in the style of a Hollywood movie trailer, with the explosion of a purple car representing Twitch. The video included another dig at the gaming platform, with the line “wait, don’t you get in trouble for playing music?”, referencing Twitch’s perpetual issues with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and legal takedowns.
Ahgren is one of the largest streamers in the gaming category, with a combined following of over 5 million between Twitch and YouTube.
This move caps the end of a strong year for YTG—according to YouTube, creators uploaded 250 million gaming videos this year alone.
Our Take
Platforms will pay for top-tier creators because they are the ones that influence the next generation and the larger middle class. Expect to see more exclusive deals for non-gaming creators on platforms like Patreon, YouTube, and Spotify.
What Spotify Wrapped Taught Us About 2021
Source: Spotify
Holding court as the top-streamed artist on Spotify for the second year in a row was Bad Bunny with 9.1 billion streams. The Puerto Rican rapper even beat out Taylor Swift despite not having any new album releases.
The most listened-to song of the year was the TikTok-fueled hit “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo, with over one billion streams. Second place went to TikTok-born artist Lil Nas X’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)”.
The single “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac was the most-streamed throwback song of the year, originally released more than 20 years ago—no doubt due to the viral TikTok of cranberry juice-drinking skateboarder @420doggface208.
If you need more proof that TikTok is directly influencing the music world, the streaming platform reported that more than 187,000 sea shanty playlists were created on the app following the TikTok trend that began back in January.
Our Take
TikTok’s fingerprints are all over Spotify, showing that what dominates the charts is less due to music execs and radio stations, and more about the social app users, largely based outside the U.S., and the algorithm serving it up. TLDR: the audience is always right.
Sponsored by Shopify
How We Launched Our Merch
Source: Colin and Samir
A key 2021 milestone for our team? Pressing publish on PressPublish.shop—our very own merch store earlier this year.
By The Numbers
8 → The number of days it took us to sell out of hats and shirts.
$40.62 → The average order value of purchases from our store.
115+ → The amount of countries our customers live in.
Launching our own shop wasn't just fun for us—it deepened our relationship with our community and allowed them to express themselves by representing our brand ethos: pressing publish.
This was all powered by Shopify: the easy-to-use, all-in-one commerce platform used by over 1.7M merchants.
Learn more about how to get your own online store started on Shopify in this blog post.
A New Community Platform Joins the Metaverse
Source: Islands.xyz
This week podcaster and entrepreneur Tiffany Zhong launched Islands, a Web3 platform that aims to be a home base for creators and their communities.
Islands serves as a cross between NFT marketplace OpenSea and the community chat app Discord. Creators will be able to sell, trade, and mint new NFTs entirely through the platform as well as offer token-gated perks to their communities.
Islands has yet to go live, but creators can join the waitlist here in order to claim their username.
Our Take
Communities are powerful, but difficult for creators to aggregate across the web. Platforms like Islands offer a solution, with infrastructure that consolidates a creator’s community and NFTs to provide a framework for group ownership.
🔥 In Other News
Thanks for reading. To kickstart your weekend, we’ll leave you with one creator who is breaking the mold and doing things differently. Click below to find out 👇
