Reddit’s r/Place helped break viewership records

This story about collaboration, boiled down, in 1:22 minutes.

What’s the fuss?

A communal art piece has taken the streaming world by storm, temporarily transforming the loyal audiences of large streamers into digital artists.

The situation

Reddit, the website where anyone can start a forum and community, began a collaborative art project called Place on this year’s April Fools Day.

• Originally from 2017, Place is a social experiment in which Reddit users could change a single pixel of an online canvas every 5 minutes — potentially even overriding others’ pixels.
• Place lasted for 4 days this year and was largely filled with references to pop culture, Internet memes, and national pride.

Place took over Twitch this year, with the biggest streamers both providing commentary on the canvas’ updates as well as wielding their large audiences virtually as paintbrushes.

• Felix “xQc” Lengyel, one of Twitch’s largest streamers with 10.4 million followers, was able to take over a sizeable portion of the canvas by instructing his audience to collaborate on creating a lewd image that was quickly censored.
• Nonetheless, his Place stream reached 233,000 concurrent viewers, breaking his viewership record.

Boiling it down

Twitch, commonly known for live video game streams, is becoming less and less synonymous with gaming.

• Twitch’s top viewed category, “Just Chatting”, has streamers literally just engaging with their audiences and is entirely non-gaming related.
• Other Twitch categories includes Cooking, Music, and Game Development with more non-gaming related ones likely on the way.

Popular online streamers are celebrities in their own right, often being more recognizable to younger audiences than movie stars.

• The power of streaming is so effective that even traditional celebrities are using it to engage with their own audiences.

Thank you so much for reading! To get these stories as they happen, check out my main site here.

Have a question? Send me an email at matt@boilitdownnews.com and I’ll answer in my next email newsletter.