If you listen to a certain segment of their fanbase, streamers have it pretty easy on the whole. Streaming, after all, should not be considered ‘real work.’ While some have embraced this idea, the majority of streamers would be quick to point out just how much goes into what they do. Streamers have a tough job - and for female streamers it’s even tougher. Kaitlyn ‘Amouranth’ Siragusa, though, has managed to make it all the way to the top. To hear her explain it though, the reason is simple.
“I work harder - full stop,” Amouranth says. “I delegate and have a team that I've painstakingly trained and educated. They educate new hires in the culture I set. We all work long and hard and I make sure incentives are aligned. At the top end, some of my employees earn six-figure incomes - in Texas, this is very meaningful. I have uncapped upside profit shares to help align goals.”
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. One only needs to look at the efforts of billionaire entrepreneurs compared to the 64-year-old cleaning lady lugging her mop up ten flights of stairs because the elevator is broken to know that becoming rich or successful is not merely a question of working hard - full stop. Amouranth is white, straight, cis, and conventionally attractive, which gives her a leg up on other content creators. Still, Amouranth is a woman and her primary field is video games, so she’s hardly insulated from discrimination. In fact, one of her accounts was recently hacked and had its name changed to ‘Twitch Slut’.
“Twitch is male dominated and the zeitgeist is still very much ‘male culture’,” she says. “It is seen as ‘simping’ to watch female content creators. If Twitch becomes more mainstream, this may change - we can only hope. Both men and women deserve the same shot, [and to] not to have viewerbases shamed for their choice with reference to viewing preference!”
While boiling Amouranth’s success down to her working hard may be oversimplifying it, so too is claiming it’s because she’s an attractive white lady. “Male dominated” may even be underselling it - of the top 100 earning streamers on Twitch, only three are women: Amouranth, Pokimane, and Sintica. Only Amouranth and Pokimane make the top 50, and none make the top 30. So, if it’s not raw effort, and it’s not because everyone on Twitch is a simp giving money to every pretty lady they see, what is it?
Amouranth seems to understand the zeitgeist of Twitch better than most. Because the majority of her streams are Just Chatting or similar-style streams rather than playing the latest games, her success depends on her being acutely aware of trends. She was one of the first streamers to go all in on the hot tub meta, a trend that became so huge it was granted its own category. These days, she’s playing both sides of the meta by investing in a pool toy company - but more on that later.
Amouranth is typically classified as an ASMR streamer, but rather than conventional ASMR, her activities include anything from licking microphones to putting on a horse head mask, a Gwen Stacy costume, and bouncing around on her bed in what became known as ‘the fart meta’. While it’s hard to have a strategy based around what the latest trend will be, Amouranth says her team is number-oriented and her decisions come from this information over anything else.
“I just try to make the best data-driven decision at each point in time,” she says. “I wish I had a unified strategy! Me and my team track every quantum of data. Every key performance indicator, every dollar of revenue, every impression.”
While the fart meta and particularly the hot tub meta helped raise Amouranth’s profile even further, they weren’t without their consequences - Amouranth’s participation in both saw Twitch ban her and a handful of other streamers for their content. In turn though, this can be an even bigger boost for her notoriety. The one way to make sure people want to see a movie is to ban it, and Amouranth has previously used her bans to promote her presence elsewhere, be they social media platforms like TikTok or adult sites like OnlyFans. She’s even been accused of getting banned on purpose, specifically to court this controversy. That, apparently, is not true.
“No one really plans it. Each ban is immensely stressful, and I never know if it'll be my last,” she says. “It's a fun narrative people like to push, but it's just not true. I don't want to be banned - even for a day.”
Whether these bans are deliberate or not, it’s clear Amouranth’s success is too big for Twitch to contain. While she came in at a relatively low 48th place for Twitch earners during the October 2021 data leak, she seems to pull in far more from elsewhere, especially compared to other streamers who still make the majority of their money from Twitch and related sites like YouTube.
On Amouranth’s Twitter, her website does not go to her Twitch page, but instead to a link hosting site that lists all of her pages, with OnlyFans posted right at the top. Amouranth purports to be number one in the world, but admits “that's probably an outdated stat” - most reports put Blac Chyna, Bella Thorne, and Cardi B as the site’s top earners, but Amouranth has been previously told by OF that she was the “number 1 grossing non-celebrity,” which would separate her from the likes of Thorne. She also recently shared a receipt that showed a topless picture had earned her $278,000, so the money is definitely pouring in.
While many women on Twitch are shamed for their sexuality, or insulted with tired lines like ‘go back to OnlyFans’, Amouranth has managed to make it work for her, and opened up about why she has embraced it. “I see it as the route with the least friction for monetization,” she says, and since she was already sharing adult content on her Patreon, “the stigma issue with it being OF wasn't really too big a factor. As a Twitch streamer, even before OF, I was subject to a lot worse.”
It’s not just through social platforms though - Amouranth has been using her personal Twitter account to explain her recent investments (including the aforementioned pool toy company) and pull back the curtain on her finances.
A big part of her strategy involves investing in real estate. “Here’s why I bought a gas station,” she explained on Twitter. “It cost me $4 million or -$110,000 depending on how you look at it. Yeah, that’s a negative sign. I was paid $110,000 and got a gas station free. And I or you can do it again and again and again.”
She managed to pull this off through tax cuts on property depreciation. Amouranth later explained that “100% bonus depreciation can offset short term capital gains or regular income (if the person qualifies).” This happens to be true. In order to qualify though, the person in question has to perform personal services with regards to the property as part of a private equity real-estate firm. When we asked about this, Amouranth said that “I’m being purposely vague, but I am a general practitioner in said private equity real-estate firm. Some of the properties or projects benefit from someone understanding and overseeing marketing efforts. I am very proficient with Facebook and Google Suite of advertising products and how to run a successful campaign.”
When she said that “I or you can do it again and again and again,” Amouranth was being completely serious. In so far as her gas stations are concerned, she plans to “sell and roll forward or sell and pay tax recapture after collecting some rent.”
These investments have gained another, more controversial arm - NFTs. If you’re still unsure exactly what an NFT is, you should check out one of these two previous TheGamer articles on NFTs and gaming’s relationship with them. And this relationship has been tentative so far - the likes of Ubisoft, Square Enix, and Stalker 2 have all dipped their toes into the murky non-fungible pool, and have all been rebuffed immediately. Amouranth though has embraced them openly, and has suffered relatively little blowback. While she’s usually at the forefront of trends, she’s unsure if NFTs are here to stay. “I'm not sure [if the games industry will embrace them],” she says. “I think Web3 has a lot of promise, but it's too early to tell. I try to approach everything with open-minded skepticism. It's hard to predict the future and only slightly easier to predict it if you're in the trenches helping to make it happen so to speak.”
NFTs use blockchain technology, much like cryptocurrency, and while energy efficient applications do exist, the vast majority of crypto-related activity is environmentally damaging. This, plus the fact many applications suggested within gaming - such as taking a skin from one game to another - are deeply unrealistic, is a major reason NFTs are so unpopular. As far as Amouranth is concerned, that needn’t be an issue.
“I think the environmental impact concern is something of a blanket statement,” she says. “Starting with that position just makes people talk past one another. People need to be much better informed before they just start repeating vague talking points. Energy use isn't inherently bad. You would need to determine how that energy is produced. Certain protocols are also more efficient - say, Solana-based projects for instance. The energy issue debate needs to happen, but participants need to be better informed. The push towards green sources should be championed and we should be figuring out how to scale renewable energy. It's a far better future than one where we only worry about rationing energy use. Grow the pie, not slice it into ever smaller pieces.”
Amouranth does admit that “sustainability needs to be part of the conversation re: anything crypto or blockchain,” but adds “I don't think it makes sense to dismiss anything off hand or in a hand-wavy way because in its current form it isn't environmental. Christmas lights in the US consume more energy than BTC for instance.”
A study by FullyCrypto, hardly an unbiased third-party, found that BTC does use less energy than Christmas lights, but admits that its own maths may be “deeply flawed”. But if energy concerns cause us to “talk past one another,” what of the other controversies with NFTs? What of the fact many artists are having their work stolen and minted? That, unlike NFTs Amouranth believes, may just be a passing fad. “I don't have a broad view of NFTs - it's mostly case by case. Re: the stolen art thing, yeah it's definitely a negative externality, but that feels/sounds a lot like early arguments against online payments; ‘you might have your credit card stolen!’. We are [in the] super early days [of] NFT and crypto, a lot of use-cases and form factors are still being determined. I'm just not firmly against, and generally more open to explore.
“I like this Bezos quote: ‘a life of stasis would be population control combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in’.”
Maybe one day we’ll live in this Bezosian paradise of unlimited clean energy and free NFTs for all. Until then, you can find Amouranth on Twitch, OnlyFans, and everywhere else at www.downbad.com. Yeah, that’s its name.
This article was jointly written by Stacey Henley and Justin Reeve based on interviews conducted by Reeve.