Last week, streamer Kai Cenat (who has tens of millions of followers across Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube) hosted the second-annual Streamer University, a five-day creator bootcamp at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas that was streamed live on Twitch and YouTube.
During the bootcamp, larger creators like Ludwig Ahren and Imane “Pokimane” Anys gave classes to smaller streamers (handpicked to attend Streamer U) about sponsorships, growth, branding and more – all of it livestreamed to fans and aspiring streamers alike.
According to metrics taken from Cenat’s channel, Streamer U peaked at 1.2 million concurrent viewers on Twitch, a 120% increase from last year. It gained nearly 58 million watch hours, 12.5 million followers, and almost 40,000 self-paid subscribers, according to data pulled by a StreamLabs partner.
Plus, the creator bootcamp was a clipping goldmine, spawning hundreds, if not thousands of clips circling other social meda platforms – some of them paid for by the brands sponsoring the event, like creator-led wireless carrier Ch@mobile. Over the five days, creators went to lunch at the Zaxby’s cafeteria, gave lectures with Red Bull fridges in the background, or played with their Meta glasses live on-stream.
“It was a masterclass in how you should actually approach branded activations in digital media,” said Mustafa Aijaz, vp of gaming and digital culture brand SoaR Gaming. “If brands can show up in a way where they’re organic and real, and they’re just there and present, it goes a long way…they’ll get those earned impressions.”
“This is where the kids live now, this is where they’re consuming,” said Bernt Ullman, co-founder at Ch@mobile. “If you want to be relevant in today’s economy, this is where you need to be.”
At least 16 brands partnered with Streamer University this year, from Fortnite, which gave three students a $7,500 brand deal, to State Farm, which gifted subs to the streamers while live. Digiday reached out to Cenat’s team to request details on earnings, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
The streamer boost
“This is what Kai’s team and AMP [a content creator collective he’s a part of] do really well. They’re really good at telling stories by partnering with brands that are open to approaching this without doing a standard ad read,” Aijaz said. “That makes a huge difference, especially for this audience, because nobody wants to sit there and hear Kai read an ad that’s not Kai’s language.”
Bringing together top streamers in a multi-day live event packed with giveaways, gaffes, and entertainment moments and amassing an army of clippers to keep engagement going after the cameras are off creates a huge branding opportunity.
Companies like food chain Zaxby’s, who have previously worked with Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, know this power well, so it showed up big at Streamer U. The food chain served over 15,000 Chicken Fingerz, 6,000 wings, 2,500 slices of Texas Toast and more than 400 gallons of sauces, a massive-scale mobilization that vp of brand strategy Ali Ghosh said took a “dedicated effort” from both the culinary and brand teams, as well as the local Zaxby’s restaurant.
“Our primary goals for Streamer University were to build brand awareness, generate meaningful exposure and create content that could live well beyond the event itself. From that perspective, the partnership exceeded expectations,” she said. “Zaxbys’ owned social channels grew by 20K+ followers, an over 1000% increase in follower growth over the prior period [data was compared week-over-week], and Zaxbys received thousands of brand mentions across Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, X and TikTok.”
These kinds of partnerships are meant to drive immediate action. “If seeing Zaxbys woven throughout the Streamer University experience inspires someone to visit their local Zaxbys or try us for the first time, that’s a win,” Ghosh said. When you take that immediate action and add the reach you can get from clips, the impact extends well beyond the few days the streams take place.
Creator-led commerce brands, particularly the ones started by streamers, understand the short and long-tail reach and engagement that livestreaming offers as well as the authenticity it can bring to an increasingly crowded (and curated) creator marketplace.
“You don’t pander to this audience, they’ll see right through that. If it’s not authentic, if it’s not credible, if it’s not aspirational, don’t do it,” Ullman said.
Streamer U, for all of its drama content (which includes disruptive behavior, interpersonal drama, and stunts), is aspirational. Up-and-coming streamers are given massive brand deals while on campus and invaluable information from leaders in the space like Ahren (who said during a lecture that he made over $1.1 million in June alone). Plus, they often get major boosts in followers and engagement after appearing at Streamer U, so the event acts as a springboard for creators.
The creator-led brands activating at Streamer U, which include Cenat’s own Tone personal care, cleverly use the event as a way to pull more creators into their ecosystem.
“We have a huge creator gifting program,” said Nathaniel Weiss, CEO and co-founder of Tone, which partnered with Shopify to sell limited-edition products during Streamer U (which quickly sold out). “We have a huge content creation program, we put the community at the center of our marketing.”
TVU, which makes expensive streamer backpacks, gave one away during the event.
“That’s such a niche product, of the 50,000 people watching, who’s gonna buy a $30,000 backpack?” Aijaz said. “But for TVU, it might be worth it because people watching the content are trying to be streamers…it’s a natural tie.”
And remember: all of this is getting clipped. The giveaways (which included free phones from Ch@mobile for every students, the not-so-top-secret streamer hacks, the raids – all of it recirculated on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram for days after Streamer U closed its doors, with many posts earning tens of thousands of views each.
“We had two separate clipping agencies following the stream throughout…whenever something happened that was relevant to us, it was clipped and repurposed and pushed back into the market for broader consumption,” Ch@mobile’s Ullman said. “We generated well over 30 million views off of the stream through clipping services, with high engagement.”
Ch@mobile also enlisted the help of a Sparq, a streamer magazine platform, to create a targeted list streamers for which to give subscriptions while they were live so that the company would get shouted out and thanked. Those gifted subscription moments were also clipped and repurposed.
Livestream events like Streamer U offer myriad levers for brands to pull. Crucially, brands have to relinquish control when working with livestreamers, whose audience often expects them to give off-the-cuff commentary and unfiltered opinions. That can be a scary place for brands to operate. “Control is a tough thing for a brand,” Weiss noted.
But Streamer U showed that the brands willing to give streamers the reins can be handsomely rewarded.
“Beyond the planned partnership elements, we also benefited from more than 150 creators streaming around the clock, generating authentic, unscripted moments that couldn’t be captured or bought through traditional media,” said Ghosh. “That combination of physical presence and organic amplification is what made Streamer University so unique, and it’s rare to find an event that offers that level of always-on visibility.”
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