Kaitlyn Siragusa (29) is the most successful streamer on Twitch as Amouranth. She is known for pushing the boundaries of Twitch’s guidelines and has been banned from the streaming platform multiple times. The first ban hit her in September 2019 – and really kickstarted her career.
What kind of ban was it? Amouranth is a controversial figure on Twitch. She became known for licking her microphone in ASMR streams or lounging in a kiddie pool. This often puts her at the edge of what is permissible according to the strict guidelines of the streaming platform.
Amouranth received her first ban after a stream on September 8, 2019, due to an apparent mishap. The streamer was lying on the floor playing with her dog – while not wearing any underwear and exposing herself several times, seemingly without realizing it.
Before Amouranth was banned for violating the guidelines concerning nudity and inappropriate clothing, viewers had already created and spread clips of the mishap. The recordings ended up in the largest streaming community on reddit, r/LivestreamFail (LSF).
A thread in the LivestreamFail subreddit gathered over 21,700 upvotes. Apparently, nothing better could have happened to Amouranth.
Clips, which are short excerpts from streams often taken out of context, can spread surprisingly quickly.
Amouranth turned an embarrassing incident into a success
What consequences did Amouranth face? The streamer got off relatively lightly and was banned for only 3 days. Amouranth returned to Twitch and continued as before. However, due to the incident, she suddenly became the talk of the town.
In a post from September 13, 2019, Amouranth wrote that the whole “ban drama” made her more relevant than anything she had done until then. She shared a screenshot from Google Trends showing the search queries related to her name.
The streamer also mentioned the subreddit LiveStreamFails (LSF), which she apparently holds partly responsible for the surge in interest about her.
What is shown in the image? The screenshot shows that interest in Amouranth was relatively low for years. After the incident in September 2019, the popularity of the search term skyrocketed. That’s pretty cool, according to Amouranth.
The streamer also explained that she was not embarrassed by the incident. It was no big deal and would only spread her name further (via Twitter).
How Amouranth’s career continued after the scandal
How did this affect her success? In fact, the incident seemed to really kickstart Amouranth’s career: After her return to Twitch in September 2019, she gained over 300,000 new followers – in the months prior, it had mostly been between 30,000 and 60,000 new followers.
However, Amouranth’s average viewer numbers did not significantly improve at that time, and in October 2019, suddenly 278,000 followers disappeared. The reasons for the rise and fall remain unclear to this day.
At that time, she couldn’t yet turn the sudden popularity into long-term growth, but the incident made Amouranth basically a kind of celebrity in the streaming space overnight. Apparently, she learned to present herself properly and to utilize the viral spread of content.
When the “Hot Tub” meta became popular on Twitch in the spring of 2021, Amouranth was right there at the top and has since been one of the most successful women on the streaming platform. In November 2022, Amouranth was finally the only woman in the top 100 most-watched streamers on Twitch.
When she was banned in September 2019, Amouranth had about 1 million followers on Twitch. Since then, her popularity has skyrocketed. However, she now does not want to rely solely on bath-water streams and wants to show more versatility in her content.
What role does the LivestreamFail subreddit play? Many streamers have a kind of love-hate relationship with the subreddit. While some fear the dubious fame from a viral clip, other streamers seem to aim to land in the subreddit intentionally.
Streamers like the Canadian Félix “xQc” Lengyel react in the stream to clips of themselves that are posted in LSF. Excerpts from the streams then find their way back into the subreddit, continuously providing streamers with new content.
Others are unhappy with how they come across in the short snippets:
