As Amouranth, Kaitlyn Siragusa (29) is the most successful streamer on Twitch. She’s known for pushing the limits of Twitch’s policies and has been banned from the streaming platform multiple times. The ban hammer hit her for the first time in September 2019 – and really boosted her career.
What was that ban? Amouranth is a controversial figure on Twitch. She’s been known to lick her mic on ASMR streams or loll about in a paddling pool. It often pushes the boundaries of what is permitted when it comes to the strict guidelines of the streaming platform.
Amouranth was first banned after a September 8, 2019 stream for an apparent mishap. The streamer was lying on the floor playing with her dog – while she wasn’t wearing her underwear and exposed herself several times, apparently without realizing it.
Before Amouranth was banned for violating nudity and inappropriate clothing guidelines, viewers had already created and shared clips of the mishap. This is how the recordings ended up in the largest streaming community on reddit, r/LivestreamFail (LSF).
A thread on the LivestreamFail subreddit garnered over 21,700 upvotes. Apparently, nothing better could have happened to Amouranth.
Clips, i.e. short excerpts from streams that are often taken out of context, can spread surprisingly.
Twitch: This is the quirky story behind the most popular clip of all time
Amouranth turned an embarrassing incident into a sense of accomplishment
What were the consequences for Amouranth? The streamer got off lightly and was only banned for 3 days. Amouranth returned to Twitch and continued as before. But the incident suddenly made her the talk of the town.
In a September 13, 2019 post, Amouranth wrote that the whole “ban drama” has made her more relevant than anything she’s done before. She also shared a screenshot from Google Trends showing searches for her name.
The streamer also mentions the LiveStreamFails (LSF) subreddit, which she apparently partly blames for the surge in interest in her.
What can be seen on the picture? The screenshot shows that interest in Amouranth has been relatively low for years. However, following the incident in September 2019, the search term’s popularity skyrocketed. That’s pretty cool, according to Amouranth.
The streamer also stated that she was not embarrassed by the incident. It’s not a big deal and will only spread her name further (via Twitter).
This is how Amouranth continued after the scandal
How did all of this affect their success? In fact, the incident seemed to really get Amouranth’s career rolling: After her return to Twitch, she was able to gain over 300,000 new followers in September 2019 – in the months before it had mostly been between 30,000 and 60,000 new followers.
But Amouranth’s average viewership didn’t improve significantly at the time, and in October 2019, 278,000 followers suddenly disappeared. What the rise and fall is all about has not yet been fully clarified.
At the time, she wasn’t able to convert sudden popularity into long-term growth, but the incident made Amouranth a streaming celebrity of sorts almost overnight. Apparently she learned from this how to put herself in the right place and to use the viral distribution of content for herself.
When the “hot tub” meta hit Twitch in spring 2021, Amouranth was at the top and has been one of the most successful women on the streaming platform ever since. Finally, in November 2022, Amouranth was the only woman in the top 100 most watched streamers on Twitch.
At the time of her ban in September 2019, Amouranth had around 1 million followers on Twitch. Since then, their popularity has increased many times over. In the meantime, however, she no longer wants to be limited to pure bathtub streams and wants to show more versatility in her content.
What is the role of the LivestreamFail subreddit? Many streamers have a kind of love-hate relationship with the subreddit. While some fear the notoriety of a viral clip, other streamers seem intent on ending up on the subreddit.
Streamers like Canadian Félix “xQc” Lengyel react to clips of themselves posted to LSF on stream. Excerpts from the streams then find their way back into the subreddit and continue to provide the streamers with new content.
Others are unhappy with how they come off in the short snippets:
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