Streamer Awards 2024: IShowSpeed wins big as event draws decent viewership despite limited coverage

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December is all about year-end celebrations, and the livestreaming world is no exception. This past weekend saw several award ceremonies honoring the top live streamers and content creation teams, with the QTCinderella’s Streamer Awards 2024 stealing the spotlight. The event attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and delivered impressive viewership numbers, even though far fewer channels covered it this time around.

The Streamer Awards is widely considered the premier global event in the livestreaming industry. It gathers the biggest names in the field: not just English-speaking creators from the U.S., but also stars from Spanish, Japanese, and other streaming communities. With dozens of categories celebrating a variety of content, the event’s highlight is the crowning of the Streamer of the Year.

Since its debut in 2022, the ceremony has traditionally taken place in February or March. However, this year, the organizers decided to shift it to December, making it a more fitting year-end event. As a result, 2024 featured two editions of the awards, and it looks like future ceremonies will follow this new year-end schedule.

  The Streamer Awards 2024 featured awards in 29 different categories / image: Streamer Awards @ X   

The biggest winner of the Streamer Awards 2024 was Darren 'IShowSpeed' Watkins Jr., who took home three awards, including the top honor, Streamer of the Year. It’s no surprise, as Speed had an outstanding year in livestreaming, completing two massively viral tours (through Europe and Southeast Asia) and becoming the first-ever English-speaking streamer to hit over 1 million Peak Viewers (PV). Of course, during the presentation of the main award, Speed didn’t miss the chance to show off his signature backflip.

Also Read: IShowSpeed has become Top 1 English-speaking streamer of all time

Although Speed took home the top award, there was another streamer who had an exceptional year: Kai Cenat. He also won three prestigious awards, including Best Streamed Collaboration (with Druski and Kevin Hart), Best Just Chatting Streamer, and Best Marathon Stream (for record-breaking Mafiathon 2). 

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Kai Cenat was the most talked-about figure in Twitch chats during the ceremony of all the nominees for the top awards. He far outpaced his closest competitors, with over 20,000 more mentions. All of Kai’s opponents in the main category (except IShowSpeed) were mentioned far less frequently: e.g., Caedrel was mentioned 100 times less than Kai.

In addition to recognizing individual streamers, the event also honored the best games and streaming teams. Thus, FaZe Clan was named the top content organization of 2024, and Chained Together was recognized as the best streaming game of the year.

The Streamer Awards 2024 Livestream Viewership Stats

Regarding official broadcasts, this edition was similar to previous years. The main streams were on QTCinderella's Twitch and YouTube channels, with many viewers also tuning in on other content creators' channels. In fact, co-streams had higher viewership than the official channels for most of the event.

The peak for QTCinderella’s Twitch channel was over 215,000 concurrent viewers, occurring right at the actual start of the ceremony, when the hosts entered the stage. However, the overall peak viewership came when the winner for Best Variety Streamer was announced, with co-streams contributing to around 57% of the total Peak Viewers.

Interestingly, in past editions, official and unofficial streams took turns leading in viewership throughout events. This year, however, the official streams were more popular only during the arrival of participants, while most viewers tuned into watch parties during the awards ceremony itself.

When it comes to overall event reach, the December edition of the Streamer Awards saw a decline across key metrics compared to the February edition. However, this drop is neither concerning nor catastrophic, especially considering that the total number of channels covering the awards was 75% fewer this time.

  2024 Gaming/Livestreaming Award Ceremonies Ranking (as of Dec 9)   

Despite a decline in overall live viewership, the December edition of the Streamer Awards remains one of the most popular gaming, esports, or livestream-related award events of 2024, second only to the February edition. In terms of reach, it surpassed events like SLAY 2024 (the Russian-speaking content creator awards by Buster) and Stream Awards (the German-speaking Twitch community awards). Arguably the only event with a chance to surpass it before the end of the year is The Game Awards, which takes place on December 12.