On November 29th, Ludwig Ahgren, one of the most famous streamers in the world, announced he would be leaving Twitch to stream content exclusively on YouTube Gaming. Ahgren’s first YouTube Gaming stream took place one day later, on November 30th.
Ludwig broke the news in a November 29th Twitter posting. In the video, Ludwig is seen driving a purple car (representing Twitch) with his manager while the two have a casual conversation. Eventually, they park the car and get out of it before the vehicle explodes. After the explosion, Ludwig finds a new, red car (representing YouTube Gaming) and decides to drive away in it. His manager even goes as far as to say the cars are basically the same, to which Ludwig replies, “Yeah, it’s just like a different color.”
Ludwig is best known for hosting a video game streaming marathon on Twitch that he called “Subathon.” During this event, he broke the all-time Twitch subscriber record after hitting 283,066 active subs.
Ahgren is a 26-year-old influencer and internet celebrity from California. He has been creating content since 2016 and spent the last three years as a streamer on Twitch.
The Profit‘s Take:
I didn’t watch the whole video, honestly. I watched until he said YouTube offered him more money, and then I turned it off. We get the point. The only data we have right now proves that YouTube Gaming should STOP doing this. It continues to lose market share to Twitch in terms of streaming. But they won’t listen. YouTube Gaming is basically saying, “We need to keep doing this. At some point, this will fix the problem.” History will say that this was a really bad decision, but nobody cares because Google has money to blow when it comes to YouTube. A bigger point is that, nowadays, a creator’s brand matters. Ludwig can go to YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch. It doesn’t matter because he will be able to draw an audience wherever he is. There’s no downside in this deal for him. I mean, he already got paid! If this fails, he can just go back to Twitch and use YouTube as a scapegoat. Ludwig’s brand will hold value whether he succeeds with YouTube Gaming or not. The only thing that will make YouTube Gaming successful is real, ground-breaking innovation. They should be good at creating new products and technologies because they have Google’s resources, but this is the one area that YouTube Gaming has been the worst at. Management doesn’t know what it’s doing, and the company isn’t leaning into its strengths. If you can make a compelling set of features and technologies exclusive to your platform, then you could easily compete with Twitch.
(All information was provided by Dot Esports, Engadget, The Verge, and Wikipedia)
I completely agree. Google/YouTube has all of the money it needs to drive real innovation. And they squander it in the wrong places. I have no suggestions on what that might be. But many of the people at Google are much smarter than me and could figure it out if they wanted to.