Soulja Boy is convinced he\u2019s the reason Twitch is so popular: \u201cThat was all me\u201d Twitch\/Soulja BoyDeAndre \u2018Soulja Boy\u2019 Way is convinced he\u2019s the reason Twitch is so popular, with the superstar rapper claiming he \u201cmade it cool\u201d to play games for an audience online way back in 2007, when Justin.tv was still in its early years. There\u2019s no denying Twitch is an internet powerhouse these days. Streaming stars like Pokimane, Shroud, and Ninja have risen to become popular modern-day celebrities in their own right off the back of the broadcasting platform, while others like Valkyrae and TimTheTatman have used their stardom on the Amazon-owned website to leverage multi-million dollar deals. Things get a little more blurry, apparently, when it comes to who built the foundations of the site. Way back yonder, in 2007, Twitch was called Justin.tv. That site\u2019s founders likely have a big claim, as do Amazon and Curse. Then there are the streamers themselves, who draw in viewers. One man believes he knows the reason though. According to Soulja Boy, he\u2019s one of the big reasons Twitch is the streaming juggernaut it is today. Soulja Boy began regularly streaming on Twitch in mid-2020, and hit his most dedicated months of broadcasting at the end of last year. He had been involved in the platform before that, but only in short spurts every few months. Despite that, the Chicago-born rapper \u2014 best known for hit single \u201cCrank That (Soulja Boy)\u201d in 2007, is convinced he had a heavy hand in Twitch\u2019s modern-day popularity. \u201cI was the first rapper on Twitch, back when it used to be called Justin.tv. I\u2019m the one that made it cool for you to be playing Xbox [and] games on Twitch. Subscribers, going live. I did that. That was all me bro,\u201d the rapper claims. \u201cYou know what I\u2019m saying? Everything\u2026 I done did it!\u201d Way also went on to state he was the first pioneer in the esports scene, founding his gaming team SODMG Gamers \u201cway before esports was a thing\u201d. The rapper suggests \u201cesports came out in 2010. Google it, YouTube it, Wikipedia it, whatever you gotta do (which we did, Google says 1972). I had SODMG since 2004.\u201d Whether or not Soulja Boy was the sole originator of Twitch\u2019s popularity, there can be no denying the streaming website has turned into a modern-day juggernaut. At any one time, Twitch boasts between 70,000 and 100,000 live channels, raking in more than two million concurrent viewers. More than eight million unique streamers went live last month, and according to TwitchTracker fans consumed more than 1066 billion minutes of Twitch content this year alone. And look, we\u2019re not denying that Soulja Boy is a popular figure. Dexerto would point out, however, that the rapper\u2019s total Twitch views (5.4m) are dwarfed, just a little, by other major stars like xQc (416m), now-banned Dr Disrespect (181m), or Pokimane (192m) over the same length of time. That doesn\u2019t stop Soulja Boy from sticking up for Twitch though; just last week, he blasted TimTheTatman, accusing him of \u201cselling out\u201d by joining YouTube.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soulja Boy is convinced he\u2019s the reason Twitch is so popular: \u201cThat was all me\u201d Twitch\/Soulja BoyDeAndre \u2018Soulja Boy\u2019 Way is convinced he\u2019s the reason Twitch is so popular, with the superstar rapper claiming he \u201cmade it cool\u201d to play games for an audience online way back in 2007, when Justin.tv was still in its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}