Streamer Kai Cenat has overtaken VTuber Ironmouse to break the Twitch subscriber record, the second time he's achieved the feat. It's all down to the ongoing "Mafiathon 2", a demonstration of livestream endurance that will see Cenat streaming for around a month: Cenat refers to his fans as the "Kai Mafia", hence the name.
Cenat had been dethroned by Ironmouse on October 2, 2024, who achieved 326,252 subscribers during her own subathon, which lasted nearly 40 days. The latter is a popular format among Twitch streamers, and in most cases sees the individual livestream constantly over a long period of time: In Ironmouse's case even appearing on-camera at Twitchcon, whereas her content is normally presented by her cartoon avatar.
In recent times the record has been held by various popular streamers, including Cenat himself, Ninja, and Ludwig all of whom have over 150,000 subscribers. This metric is distinct from a straight follower count (Cenat has 14.1 million followers) and prized because it represents fans paying a monthly fee to the content creator and Twitch for ad-free viewing and extras like emotes. Just to add one more wrinkle, the number can obviously go down as well as up.
Cenat sailed past Ironmouse on November 11, day 11 of Mafiathon 2, and reacted in archetypical streamer fashion by screaming a lot before his mates joined in and ripped his top off. Per Twitchtracker Cenat's subs now stand at just over 350,000, which does represent the all-time record, with a considerable stretch of the subathon to go.
"Lost #1 a month & some change ago completely planned another one in less than two months and came back and we got the world record again," said Cenat on X. "I love all my supporters from the bottom of my heart job still not finished only day 11!" Cenat later celebrated the 340,000 and 350,000 milestones, saying he feels "blessed."
For her part, Ironmouse congratulated Cenat and predicted he has a chance of making it to one million: "I bet he makes it to a million…" she said on-stream, "he hasn’t even done the whole month yet."
The whole Mafiathon 2 idea is hugely well-resourced, complete with a real-world advertising campaign. A building in LA was painted over with a link to Cenat's Twitch channel, and accompanied by a trailer starring Kim Kardashian as the streamer's therapist. Explaining Mafiathon to her, Cenat says "I stream for 30 days straight, 24 hours every single day [...] They watch me eat, sleep, shower, on camera, the whole entire time."
The stream began on November 1 and is planned to last until the end of the month. It got off to a bad start, with Cenat being swatted on day one: Not the first time this has happened to the streamer, though thankfully his profile is now such that law enforcement responded appropriately. But since then the personality has used his sway to call in all sorts of celebrity favours and maintain viewer interest, including a visit to Snoop Dogg's recording studio on November 4 (during which Cenat got the tour and was gifted a large marijuana joint). Rapper Lil Uzi Vert performed, GloRilla joined Cenat for a spot of cooking, and other guests have included Serena Williams, Miranda Cosgrove, Kodak Black, Denzel Curry and Quavo.
Cenat's "Mafiathon 2" has already been nominated for Best Marathon Stream at the upcoming Streamer Awards, and no doubt November will just see him pushing that record-breaking number even higher. He's still got a way to go to overhaul Ninja's astonishing 19 million followers though: Cenat's follower count stands at just over 13 million, making him the fifth most-watched personality on the platform.
