In the past days, two of the world’s largest livestreaming marathons came to a close in North America. Darren “IShowSpeed” Watkins Jr and Kai Cenat hosted their own respective events throughout September, the America Tour 2025 and Mafiathon 3. With both creators topping the livestreaming charts, Streams Charts compares two events’ viewership and how these livestreaming titans stack up against one another.
Kai Cenat’s Mafiathon 3 was one of the biggest events of the year in livestreaming. Each year, the North American creator continues to push boundaries with his month-long subathon, and Mafiathon 3 was no different this year. On top of the massive watch time, he also set a new platform record for both Subscribers and Followers on Twitch.
While Kai was beginning his Mafiathon 3 at the start of the month, IShowSpeed was already a week into his United States of America Tour. Beginning at the end of August, the 35-day tour saw Speed travel around all corners of the United States, meeting fans, seeing sights, and generally hosting exciting, IRL content for his fans. While his raw viewership numbers were not able to match Kai’s, who enjoyed celebrity cameos from the likes of LeBron James, he still managed to come out ahead in some categories.
IShowSpeed America Tour and Kai Cenat Mafiathon 3 viewership comparison
Kai Cenat’s Mafiathon 3 was massively popular, rocketing him to the top of the livestreaming leaderboards for the month, far ahead of the competition. Kai’s livestreaming marathon event generated over 86.7M Hours Watched and saw him receive over one million peak concurrent viewers – a new personal record for his Twitch channel.
While IShowSpeed wasn’t able to match this raw viewership, his America Tour saw him receive almost the same Followers Gained on Twitch as Kai Cenat. While Speed’s usual largest audience is found on YouTube Live, his US tour appealed greatly to the many North American fans on Twitch. Thanks to his tour and its multistreams, he earned over 1.12M followers on Twitch, and another million subscribers to his YouTube account, too.
While Kai stuck to Twitch for his Mafiathon 3 event, Speed multistreamed the entire tour to both his Twitch and YouTube accounts. Generally, YouTube is still Speed’s larger platform, and during his America Tour, it accounted for over 24M Hours Watched, or 73.5% of the tour’s total. YouTube was also the home to IShowSpeed’s greatest peaks during the tour, which we have broken down below.
Throughout IShowSpeed’s recent America Tour, Washington, DC, was his most popular destination with over 210K Peak Viewers (PV) recorded on his YouTube channel. The event saw Speed visit historic sights such as the Washington Monument, all with an extravagant stream of historical caricatures and tourism. His next most popular city was Phoenix, AZ, where he received just shy of 200K PV this time.
Generally, Speed’s YouTube channel was more popular than his Twitch, but they were not always peaking at the same time. For example, Greenville, NC, where Speed collaborated with world-famous YouTuber James "MrBeast" Donaldson, saw over 53K viewers tune into Speed’s Twitch stream, making it the most popular destination for the purple platform in the tour.
For Kai Cenat’s Mafiathon 3, the most popular day was the ultimate, event-closing stream. The September 30 broadcast saw sports superstar LeBron James join Kai on a basketball court, and make a longer appearance on stream with the creator. As part of the fun, LeBron cut Kai’s dreads to celebrate the streamer reaching over one million subscriptions.
Aside from the final day, the closing days of Kai’s Mafiathon 3 are what enjoyed the most viewers, and it's when Kai held some of his most daring ideas. From skydiving live on stream to reminiscing about it all with Druski, Kai’s final days of the marathon event were highly watched by a record-breaking amount of fans for his Twitch channel.
All in all, Kai Cenat was the dominant force for September on Twitch, generating tens of millions of hours watch time and setting both platform-wide and personal records. While IShowSpeed’s US tour fell slightly behind this event, it still generated a massive watch time throughout its 35 days of adventure, and rivalled Kai’s own Followers Gained during his subathon. Keep an eye on the latest happenings and news in the livestreaming industry with Streams Charts.
