Gambling streaming on Twitch (Image: Supplied)

Internet celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers are spending hours every day broadcasting themselves gambling in online casinos. In many cases, these content creators are sponsored by offshore casinos that are offering them lucrative deals, free money to gamble with, and incentives to encourage as many of their young fans as possible to sign up.

Twitch is a popular social media platform that allows people to broadcast video content online. The platform was originally created to allow people to livestream themselves playing video games for others to watch. It’s expanded to include all kinds of activities, including people making music, working out or often just chatting with their audience — with professional streamers spending dozens of hours every week interacting with their audience. 

The platform has on average 2.5 million people watching streamers at any given time, with more than 16 billion hours watched in 2020. In Australia, the biggest demographic is men aged between 18-34.

Twitch creators streaming themselves gambling has become increasingly prevalent on the platform. Unlike YouTube or Facebook, Twitch has a more laissez-faire approach to gambling that allows any user to stream themselves gambling and linking to online casinos. The platform itself has dedicated categories for games like slots (online poker machines) and roulette which allow users to quickly find people who are streaming themselves partaking in those.

The idea of creators who focus entirely on sharing content of their gambling with real money has existed for years. Poker was very popular early on in the platform’s existence, but now entirely luck-based games like slots have become the biggest form of gambling on Twitch.

Australian accounts like Ozhunt and aussieslots are among the most popular dedicated gambling accounts on the platform, regularly pulling in hundreds of viewers on average to watch them play online poker machines for hours. 

What’s new is how mainstream Twitch stars have begun to embrace gambling. Creators who have built up enormous audiences for playing games aimed at children like Fortnite are streaming themselves betting large amounts of money.

It’s been the 15th most popular game streamed on Twitch in the last seven days, according to Twitch analytics website TwitchTracker. During this time period, there’s been an average of more than 40,000 people at any one time watching streamers gambling, racking up more than 6,850,129 hours spent watching it.

AngelMelly is a long-time New Zealand-based Twitch streamer, with more than 264,000 followers on the platform — she chats with her audiences, plays video games and has now begun streaming herself playing slots.

She tells Crikey that streaming slots has helped her expand her audience: “It’s so much fun, it’s been growing my streams 10x more,” she said.

But AngelMelly, whose streams have been sponsored by major online gambling companies DuelBits and Stake, explains how she’s very careful about what she tells her audience about gambling, and about her own habits.

“I make sure to tell my audience when I’m streaming that I will never put money in that I’m not OK with losing, my limit per stream of my own money will always be $500, the moment you put that money in you need to tell yourself that the money is gone and lost,” she said.

While details of sponsorships are not public, it’s clear that sponsorships with gambling companies can be exceedingly lucrative. 

One major streamer turned down an offer from DuelBits of between US$1.4million and $1.6million each month to stream slots because he had a better offer, according to a private message he showed on stream. Other streamers have spoken about getting offers for tens of thousands per hour of playing on Twitch.

Part of these sponsorships is being given money to gamble with during their online streams.

“They would give me $500 per stream and whatever money I profit I get to keep but it would be capped at a certain amount that I can withdraw, and when I’m playing with sponsored money I ALWAYS tell my chat ‘I’m playing reckless because this is sponsored money’,” AngelMelly said in a message.

Not all streamers are transparent like this, according to University of Sydney’s Dr Mark Johnson, whose research focuses on Twitch and live-streaming, and the incentives of commercial relationships can complicate creators’ relationships with their audience.

He points to how streamers will offer incentives for their viewers to start gambling as well such as bonus credit, encouraging them to begin playing while also earning money for every audience member who signs up. 

“Lots of research has shown that viewers are very keen to feel close to these creators. That desire to connect with what the streamers are doing might be complicated by the real money involved,” Johnson said.

Streams sponsored by gambling companies and promoting playing could be illegal in Australia. Online slots and other online casino games are banned in Australia, and the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 prohibits advertising online gambling to Australian audiences. 

Australian news Twitch streamer Pixelsmixel has been critical of gambling streaming. She said she’s surprised by how accepting the streaming community has been of the growing level of gambling promotion.

“To assume that young people aren’t watching gambling streams thinking ‘Maybe this could happen to me’ is wrong. There’s very little transparency and because it’s exciting to watch, any criticism often falls on deaf ears,” she said.

Johnson warns against a moral panic over a fear that exposing viewers to gambling will lead to a slippery slope into gambling habits, but said there are concerns about how streamers may misrepresent the reality of gambling to their audiences. 

He said facts like whether streamers are playing with their own money, whether they’re sponsored, what their relationship is like with a gambling company are often obscured. “By themselves they are quite small but collectively are important. It might give a biased picture of what these activities are,” he said.