Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren has smashed some serious records with his subathon, and the success he's enjoyed from the event has been stunning. However, he has no intention of doing this sort of thing again any time soon, and he's got a good reason for it.
Beginning on March 13th, Ludwig had 1,730 subscribers on the streaming platform and by the end, he'd gotten an all-time high of more than 283,000 subscribers. The point of a subathon is that with every new subscriber, a countdown clock til the end of the stream is extended by ten seconds. Theoretically, as long as there are new subscriptions to the account, the stream will never end. And that's what it felt like for a lot of the last month. There's this excellent clip of Ludwig waking up bleary-eyed in the middle of the night and checking his stream countdown which has been increased by eight whole hours while he's been sleeping. He's not thrilled in that moment, to say the least, but apart from that, he's been over the moon with the response to his subathon.
"Even [$150,000] is still less valuable than the increase in viewership, the total follower gain, the New York Times article," he said on stream. "We got a New York Times article! That's insane... The amount of attention this has all received is definitely worth it." Of his earnings, approximately $350,000 is set to go out to charities, which is an awesome achievement and the last day of the subathon involved encouraging viewers in a charity subscription drive where he'd pledged to donate $5 to The Humane Society and St Jude's for every subscription. In doing so, he obliterated Ninja's record for the highest number of subs to any one channel.Advert
So, why not try this once more? After the massive gains that he and his brand have gotten from the zaniness of the subathon challenge? Well, it's rather straightforward, really. "The reason I would never do one again is very simple," said Ludwig on stream recently. "And it's the reason why you shouldn't make a sequel to the movie The Hangover... It'll never be as good as the original."
Indeed, the momentum of this stunt wouldn't have been this impactful if it had been piggy-backing off the success of someone else's event. There'd constantly be a bar to clear, the need to be more spontaneous and more ridiculous to accrue more attention than before. Moreover, he'd been working for more than a month straight. Wanting some time off is clearly the best thing for Ludwig right now.
Featured Image Credit: Ludwig via Twitch