During last month’s presidential debate, Hasan Piker appeared in the corner of the screen on his Twitch channel. With the debate playing live behind him, he interjected sporadically.
“Boo, you suck,” he hollered when Vice President Kamala Harris answered a question about the war in Gaza. When former President Donald J. Trump began discussing the pets of Springfield, Ohio, Mr. Piker unleashed two high-pitched screams.
The viewer chat log, running alongside his stream, lit up with all-caps shock and awe when Mr. Trump said, “They’re eating the cats.”
“I just got up and started yelling — that was a real honest reaction,” Mr. Piker, 33, said in an interview. “That sort of thing, I think, ends up being entertaining for people that are watching.”
On Tuesday, when the vice-presidential candidates, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, face each other in a debate, Mr. Piker will be back online. He will spend hours before and after the event talking about the election on Twitch. So will many streamers on other platforms, including YouTube, Rumble and Kick.
Those sites have become an increasingly popular place for people to discuss current events, with some streamers turning into de facto pundits, offering their takes on the news for hours on end every day. Major political debates have become a big event for many of them and their audience.
TV still far outdraws streaming sites during major political events, but every election cycle brings more streams and more viewers, edging them into the mainstream. More than one million people watched the Harris-Trump debate on a livestream not connected to a news organization, including the roughly 170,000 concurrent viewers who watched Mr. Piker, according to data posted on X by Live Search, a search engine for livestreams.
As a result, streamers have become the focus of intense interest for both presidential campaigns as they chase a much-sought-after slice of the 2024 electorate: the millions of mostly young, mostly male Americans whose primary sources of news and information are streaming sites, some of them still best known as places to watch people play video games.
“I don’t think that Twitch is ever going to become like a news epicenter,” said Nathan Grayson, author of a coming book, “Stream Big,” about Twitch, which was founded in 2011 and initially devoted to gamers. “But more people get their news this way now than they did in 2020.”
Livestreams have been friendlier territory for Mr. Trump than for Ms. Harris. His anti-establishment message and unscripted style fit with the overall ethos of the medium. Democrats have been trying to catch up, but, given the party’s tentative approach, some worry it may come too late to make a difference before Election Day on Nov. 5.
The most-watched political commentator on a livestream during September’s presidential debate was Dan Bongino, who drew about 349,000 concurrent viewers to Rumble, a popular platform among conservatives. More people watched Mr. Bongino stream the debate on Rumble than watched The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, C-SPAN or CNN stream the debate on their own YouTube channels.
Adin Ross, a Kick streamer who interviewed (and gave gifts to) Mr. Trump in August, also made the top 25, with about 61,400 concurrent viewers.
Mr. Ross’s audience is what Mr. Trump’s aides have referred to as “target persuadables” — men under 40 who are more likely to get their news from social media or YouTube than from newspapers or cable news.
Unlike sites like TikTok and Instagram, where the rapid-scroll experience and individual accounts rarely capture users’ attention for more than a few seconds at a time, gaming platforms attract users who spend vast quantities of time glued to streams — on Twitch, over three and a half hours a day on average — and develop a high degree of trust in the streamers they follow.
In February, Progressive Victory, a liberal political action committee focused on getting streamers involved in political activism, harnessed some of that engagement by bringing Kick and Steven Bonnell, a YouTube streamer known as Destiny, to Cincinnati to support Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat running for re-election. After Mr. Bonnell promoted the event online, some 300 of his followers showed up in person and ended up knocking on 40,000 doors.
“It’s about finding ways for them to effectively engage with politics,” said Sam Drzymala, the PAC’s founder, who is planning a similar event, but with at least four streamers, in Wisconsin in October.
Twitch is the top live video platform after YouTube, according to Streams Charts. In the decade since 2014, when Amazon spent $1 billion to acquire the company, its content has expanded. Millions watched a live celebrity boxing tournament in Spain on July 13, breaking Twitch’s single-day record.
All Twitch streams are tagged with categories, like “food,” “minecraft,” “futbol” or “comedy.” Since last year, the number of broadcasting hours under the “politics” tag has increased almost 40 percent, according to the company.
“We think the interactivity of Twitch sets it apart — you’re experiencing these moments with your community, with chat, all live and in real time,” the company said in a statement.
Rumble also broke its record for concurrent viewership on the night of the Harris-Trump debate, with more than one million people watching various streams, according to a news release. (Twitch said it averages 2.5 million viewers at any given time.)
“We all know where the future is heading, but we are still in the early innings,” Chris Pavlovski, the chief executive of Rumble, wrote on X after the Sept. 10 debate. Neither Rumble nor Mr. Bongino responded to requests for comment.
These “early innings” have been financially precarious. Rumble, a public company, reported a net loss of $70 million for the first six months of 2024. In January, Twitch announced plans to lay off more than 500 workers. Its chief executive, Dan Clancy, said at the time that his company was not profitable.
In July, a Needham analyst indicated that Twitch could be worth $46 billion. But a 2023 survey from the University of Southern California found that just 3 percent of American adults used Twitch, compared with 66.5 percent who used YouTube and 26.7 percent who used TikTok.
Today, the strongest selling point for watching a debate through one of these platforms is entertainment. Most streamers say “that they are first and foremost entertainers, regardless of what their purview is or what they cover,” said Mr. Grayson, the author of the book on Twitch.
Mr. Piker seems to agree. He said he saw little difference between his commentary and that of someone like David Axelrod, the former Obama administration official and CNN senior political commentator. Except, Mr. Piker said, he tries to be entertaining. And his viewership for the September debate was about 36 percent higher than when he streamed a presidential debate in 2020.
“These are people who are their own centers of gravity in media,” said Mr. Drzymala of Progressive Victory. “They’re as popular and as influential as any cable news hosts within their demographics.”
The post Not Just Fun and Games: Politics Edges Deeper Into Livestreams appeared first on New York Times.
