Celebrities Twitchin’ to Talk
Twitch is one of the world's fastest-growing streaming sites with over a million viewers a day. It streams everything: E-sports and music to casual conversations and political debates. Like any new social media platform, however, celebrities of all kinds, including actors from your favourite TV shows and anime, have to build a following on there to stay relevant to their audiences. Twitch allows the cast and crew of the streams to interact directly with the viewers via its constantly - and almost frustratingly fast - updating chat board. It is partially because of this, that Twitch has helped many celebrities to advertise charities and social schemes that they are involved with, my personal favourite being the cast of the Stream Critical Role.
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Critical Role started in 2012, when, as stated at the beginning of every stream, “a bunch of nerdy a** voice actors get together and play dungeons and dragons”; a tabletop role-playing game famous all over the world. They started out working together with Geek and Sundry but have since become a brand all of their own. They promote not only the playing of D&D, but also of supporting businesses such as D&D Beyond and Dwarven forge. The support of businesses hasn’t stopped there. Critical Roles kickstarted the campaign’s success due largely to the stream's popularity amongst twitch viewers in general. This campaign set out to earn money to turn the first campaign of Critical Role into an animated series voiced by the following: Mathew Mercer, Marisha Ray, Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, and Ashley Johnson. In addition to these accomplished and well-known voice actors, they also have guest stars such as Joe Manganiello, Will Wheaton, Deborah Ann Woll, and many more who are helping to continually increase the viewership of the popular stream.
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Within a few weeks of the beginning of the Kickstarter Campaign, it had already exceeded its expectations. It has now earned over 11 million USD in donations, which is more than enough for at least one season. This demonstrates the way that a slow-growing but loyal fanbase from Twitch is something many Celebrities may seek after; adding to Twitch's star-studded cast of streamers from actors such as Terry Crews to musicians like Matt Heafy.
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In these unprecedented times, I believe everyone requires some escape from reality, Critical Role provides this for millions of viewers. It is a stream where viewers can watch a fantasy story play out its many twists and turns, but also enjoy the fun and friendly interaction of friends on a weekly basis. Anyone who has played D&D can attest to its quality as a creator of unlikely friendships. One of the first charities Critical Role supported was for this exact purpose: to bring the experience of such a creative and exploratory game to thousands of children in the LA area. The stream allowed these actors to relay to an audience the usefulness of D&D as a tool to help these children and gain donations for them. This is one of the many charities that have been promoted using Twitch and consequently, using the voice of those with a large audience.
Overall, Celebrities use Twitch for the same reasons they use other social media platforms: it gives an audience to which they can present information, charities, and gain support for further ventures in their various businesses, but overall to talk directly about their passions. The popularity of Twitch to some extent is undoubtedly due to the ability of fans to interact directly with streamers. This is something that other platforms have started to follow suit with.
Jack Glidewell
Sources:
https://www.twitch.tv/directory
https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Critical_Role
https://streamertactics.com/celebrity-twitch-streamers/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/14/critical-role-helped-spark-a-dungeons-dragons-renaissance.html
https://www.twitch.tv/p/en/about/?utm_referrer=https://www.google.com/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/328340629078372812/
https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/viewers
Reviewed by Jack Glidewell
on
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Rating:
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