Over the past two years, Kai Cenat has become the undisputed leader of live-streaming hype. The early phase of Kai Cenat’s streaming career thrived off of stunts and collaborations, leading to explosive growth with costumed events and celebrity cameos. One of the cornerstones of his content has been marathon streams in which he pushes himself to provide a consistent flow of non-stop content.
Chief among these are his subathon streams known as “Mafiathons” – a portmanteau of “marathon” and “Mafia”, the name for his fanbase. On November 1st, Kai Cenat began Mafiathon 2, a much-hyped event promising to relive the glory of the iconic first Mafiathon stream back in February of 2023. In this article we’re looking at the success of Mafiathon 2 so far and comparing it with the past success of Kai Cenat’s many other marathon streams.
Mafiathon 2 is Kai Cenat’s Biggest Marathon Ever
Roughly halfway into Mafiathon 2, Kai Cenat is already pulling in monumental viewership. As of November 18th, Mafiathon 2 has generated 44.7M hours watched with a peak viewership of 270K concurrent viewers. To put this into perspective, that’s an average viewership of almost 110K over 18 straight days of continuous streaming. In fact, with 12 days left to go, Mafiathon has already almost exceeded the total hours watched for the original Mafiathon (discussed more below).
Other than Kai Cenat’s immense popularity and a string of collaborations, numerous on-stream events have been keeping viewers hooked. On the second day, Kai Cenat and his friends hosted a fully costumed fake wedding full of drama, and on the first day the stream was temporarily cut by Twitch due to “swatting” – a form of harassment where streamers have a police SWAT team circle their address. Beyond this initial speed bump, Kai Cenat has been meeting with celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Miranda Cosgrove, and Serena Williams to keep the hype going. All of this is for a good cause, with 20% of all profit going towards building a school in Nigeria.
Kai Cenat’s Sub Growth Explodes With Subathon Support
Even though Mafiathon 2 is only part way through, Kai Cenat is already breaking records. Kai Cenat’s sub count is sitting at 391K as of the time of writing, having shot past the previous record holder ironmouse who hit 326K Twitch subs a couple of months ago. When ironmouse broke the record during Twitch’s annual SUBtember event, Kai Cenat promised to regain his title (having previously held the record for over a year at 306K subs).
Kai Cenat’s sub count has steadily picked up over the last couple of years. In 2022, he was averaging a few thousand new subs per month, before gaining traction in the second half of the year. All of this mounting popularity paid off in February 2023 when Kai Cenat hit a personal record of 54.8K new subs in one month thanks to the original Mafiathon. As a firmly established streamer, Kai Cenat now regularly pulls in tens of thousands of new subscribers every month even outside of specific subathon events. Note that the quoted values don’t account for “churned” subs (i.e. subscribers that Kai Cenat lost during this time). Churned subs are particularly common for subathon events, as many subscribers opt not to renew after their first month.
Kai Cenat’s Gaming Content Mostly Centres on Marathon Streams
Realizing the popularity of these marathon streams, Kai Cenat has constructed his streaming schedule around these events with high-production trailers, costuming, and viewer perks for tuning in. So far, Kai Cenat has hosted 9 major marathon streams, with only three being IRL streams (his two Mafiathons, and his 24-Hour Jail stream). As these streams vary greatly by airtime, the fairest way to compare the relative success of these marathons is by looking at their average viewership and peak viewership.
Looking first at IRL streams, these tend to be Kai Cenat’s most successful marathons. The original Mafiathon and the 24 Hour Jail marathon brought in average viewerships of 66.6K and 76.8K, respectively. Mafiathon spawned viral moments which have since become ingrained in the lore of Kai Cenat’s channel, such as getting attacked by dogs (on purpose of course, handled by dog trainers). This first Mafiathon set the precedent for events to come, building Kai Cenat’s legacy as he shot past Ninja and Ludwig’s previous Twitch subs records. The 24-Hour Jail marathon pulled in the higher average airtime, mainly due to its much shorter length and pent-up hype from Mafiathon. Mafiathon 2 is on track to surpass both of these IRL marathons however, already having the highest peak viewership of 270K.
In 2024, Kai Cenat tried numerous gaming marathon streams to mix up the formula. By far the most popular solo stream was his original 172-hour Elden Ring marathon which brought in an average viewership of 91.8K. The series was so popular that Kai Cenat followed it up with marathons of all the other major Souls-like titles by FromSoftware, including Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. IShowSpeed decided to join in the fun, collaborating with Kai Cenat on a 106-hour Minecraft marathon with an average viewership of 115K – the highest so far! Although IShowSpeed no doubt boosted Kai Cenat’s viewing figures, Kai still brought in 4.5M hours watched more than IShowSpeed over the course of their respective marathon streams.
Thanks to the overwhelming popularity of these marathon events, the majority of Kai Cenat’s most viewed games revolve around recent marathon streams. 6 of the top 11 most viewed categories by hours watched are exclusively related to marathon streams, with Elden Ring coming second at 20.1M hours watched. This isn’t completely surprising, given that Kai Cenat’s marathons also rank among some of the most viewed streams of all time. Funnily enough, the I’m Only Sleeping category even brought in 20M hours watched over the past two years (albeit with a much lower average viewership) due to Kai’s periodic rest periods during marathon streams.
Still though, Just Chatting remains Kai Cenat’s most popular category by far with 175.8M hours watched. Given the overwhelming success of Mafiathon 2 so far, Kai Cenat will no doubt create more IRL marathon streams in the future, hopefully innovating on the format with new twists. For now, Stream Hatchet will update on the progress of Mafiathon 2 when it finishes up in about a week’s time with the final viewership and subs result.
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