"Jesuses for schoolkids": All about streamer Karina and the stars of live streams. You may not want to know, but you'll have to.

If you don’t play games, you probably don’t know who streamers are. That’s a pity, because as streamer Karina put it, it’s “a world full of memes, happiness and tears”. Streamers are people who play through games and/or show their life in real time. On the most popular streaming platform Twitch mainly games are broadcast, so people usually call those who play streamers. This world is closely connected to another one – the world of vloggers. Clips from streams are uploaded to YouTube, popular episodes become memes and rack up millions of views (unlike business publications’ articles).

Streamers earn from donations, meaning viewers’ tips (the average donation in Russia is 80 rubles), and from paid channel subscriptions. People pay $4.99 a month on Twitch, the streamer gets half. Streamers also make money from ads, and stars get contracts from gaming and FMCG companies. For example, in January 2015 18-year-old Karina Kozyreva, stage name Karina Sychyova, earned a record 850,000 rubles from donations, and a few months later – 1 million rubles from advertising alone.

Most money comes from so-called native advertising, when the showman wears a shirt with a brand logo or uses a product on camera as if it’s not an ad but “I’m just brushing my teeth with this wonderful brush”. “It’s hard for a Russian streamer to make money on regular YouTube ads,” comments Leonid Davydov, manager of the partner channel network VSP Group. “The value of a Russian viewer is much lower than an American one due to the ruble rate and market irrelevance. Gaming bloggers earn only 15,000 rubles for a million views.”

According to popular streamers, the most successful one in Russia is Ilya Madison, who consistently earns at least 150,000 rubles a month from Twitch subscriptions. For comparison: popular streamer and blogger Felix Kjellberg, known as Pewdiepie, earned $12 million last year. And according to CNBC, pop-streamers on average make $3000-5000 a month for 40 hours of gaming a week from subscriptions alone. YouTube has its own streaming service, Facebook launched streams and the Go Live feature together with Blizzard, the developer of Warcraft and Diablo. In Russia, “VKontakte” finally woke up and launched a video streaming service where you can interact with viewers and send donations like on Twitch.

Among popular streamers there are esports athletes who earn from gaming competitions. Na’Vi team creator Alexander Kokhanovsky believes that “it’s streams that brought esports to the mass market because they allowed people far from esports to watch game broadcasts”.

Streamers are idols for everyone willing to spend hours a day glued to someone else’s life on live. “Sekret” looked into the nature of Karina’s (sharishaxd) success.

Cozy girl

Karina Sychyova from Belgorod woke up to thousands of personal messages on VKontakte. The MDK public page, famous for its misanthropic humor and 7 million followers, posted a top of the sexiest Russian streamers. The clip with Karina blew many people’s minds. “In the first video Karina says: ‘It’s hard, it’s hard’, we didn’t know what the joke was, apparently the vibe was like – look at the dumb girl,” recalls Karina’s uncle and manager Andrey Nabokov. That phrase quickly became a meme among schoolkids. Before the public posts, Karina’s Twitch streams were watched by 500 people. The next week it grew to 20,000 viewers. “Everyone freaked out,” summarizes Nabokov.

Two months later famous DJ Enjoykin released a clip with edits from Karina’s videos with a catchy chorus: “Sup, dvach, mur-mur-mur-mur, I’m a cozy cutie, I’m a cozy girl”. The author is called a master of musical narcotics, the clip got over 20 million views. Today Karina has millions of followers, hundreds of communities and profiles of girls trying to imitate her. In January Karina entered the list of the world’s most popular streamers, outranking esports stars like Daniil Ishutin (Dendi). “The start was such that I thought: she’ll conquer the world,” recalls Roberto Panchvidze, founder of MDK.

On her streams Karina played Dota2 – one of the most popular games among schoolkids. Never before had a streamer collected so many simultaneous declarations of love and insults. Esports commentator Vitaly Volochai (V1lat, 183,000 followers on Twitter) even lashed out: “A captain of one of the best teams in the world is watched by fewer people than some underdeveloped female specimen”.

Watching Karina’s stream you might conclude she has bipolar disorder. One moment she’s sitting with a headband with ears and a pink pajama, talking about meeting a “cute pussy” on the street (Karina calls anything cute a “pisya”), then she turns into a beast, yells obscenities and tells viewers to go ***. That’s part of the success: many like to watch how a cozy cutie turns into a demon in seconds. Viewers send “talking donations” for 30 rubles: a robot reads the message on screen where Karina is called a beloved kitty, then a bitch and a whore. Karina reacts: from “thaaanks” to “go **** yourself, bitch, f*** off, *****”. The last phrase became a meme. At the peak of her popularity in January, Twitch users were sending messages every two seconds during a live stream.

Since she was 13 Karina has lived in Italy. Her mother Yulia married an Italian and moved there with her daughter. Yulia sells large European brands’ clothes by mail to Russia and wants her daughter to get into the fashion industry. On her advice Karina enrolled in the Institute of Applied Arts in Legnano in the fashion design faculty – though she didn’t like studying (“it was pointless”). By then the daughter had started living alone in Legnano, and Yulia asked her brother Andrey Nabokov to come from St. Petersburg. Nabokov is 32, a former professional esports player himself, he plays under the nickname barenzi.

I came to see Karina in Legnano, a suburb of Milan. She and Nabokov set our meeting at the central square by the Basilica of San Magno. Last summer, after the biggest Dota2 championship The International, Karina showed her uncle Twitch. She laughed at female streamers who got offended by insults: “All of that was created as a parody of other streamers. They instantly banned those who insulted, and I answered everyone, I was curious”.

The first stream aired in August 2015. At first she and Nabokov streamed together, but they quickly realized users wanted Karina. An iPad with a camera was propped on a roll of toilet paper: “The quality was eye-watering, about 200 people watched us”. But already in the first week Karina caught attention. A Frenchman from Dubai sent her 500 euros and left his WhatsApp number, Karina never messaged him. Then Dota2 world champion Henrik Anberg (AdmiralBulldog) and other popular players joined the stream. A week later 1,000 people were watching Karina. According to Nabokov, she was already in the Russian-language Twitch top back then. In August she was invited to comment on The International 2015 together with Mikhail Galustyan on Odnoklassniki.

Sup, dvach, mur-mur-mur-mur, I’m a cozy cutie, I’m a cozy girl

Karina’s laptop came from Germany (“you can’t even buy a decent mouse in Italy”), but it turned out to be broken. They waited another month for a new one. “Everyone thinks it’s a commercial project. There were so many versions – that I’m her producer, that I came with big money, that we bought public pages, and the TV channel ‘Dozhd’, and other media. But we crowdfunded the laptop,” says Nabokov.

The first broadcast from the new computer on December 20 drew 1,500 viewers. “People saw that a girl was being watched by a thousand people, they came in, and there was hell and Israel,” Nabokov recalls. The hype lasted two weeks and ended on January 12, along with school holidays. There are other versions, though. Leonid Davydov from VSP Group, like other market experts, believes that “Shkuragaming” is a well-planned commercial project. “Most likely the screenshot with donations was leaked on purpose, I think those 850,000 rubles weren’t really there. But there is no proof, not even Twitch knows the number,” says Davydov. Yet he admits that “Karina became a flagship for Twitch and popularized it”.

Nabokov claims Twitch’s management hindered Karina. “The quality of Karina’s streams dropped, most likely because of the platform’s management. They have partnerships with serious firms like Blizzard, there are paid highlights, and in January it felt like she was playing alone.” Due to the drop in quality viewers started leaving; by the end of January only 8,000 remained from 15,000 users.

Twitch did not comment on these accusations. Only Alexey Krupnik, the CIS representative, said: “The rules are the same for everyone, there is no discrimination. Only our stories are on the radar, so few know how many foreign streamers, including popular ones, have been blocked for violations”.

Trying to free herself from Twitch-dependence, Karina started a YouTube channel and posted a video – a test of a new camera – where she said the famous phrase that she is “a cozy cutie”. The channel got 70,000 subscribers in a month. Then Enjoykin released the famous mur-mur-mur video and brought several more tens of thousands of fans to the channel.

Streams evolved from playing Dota2 into a show: Karina received comments and replied, and everyone watched her reactions. Famous vloggers offered joint streams. The record was set by a broadcast with schoolkids’ idol Firamir, who posts Minecraft let’s plays. “Back then 35,000 viewers watched us, over 300,000 views of the stream, that’s the whole Twitch audience in Russia,” says Nabokov.

Popular vloggers and streamers split into Karina’s friends and enemies, and exposé groups appeared on VKontakte. They wrote that Karina profits from hatred, that all her moves are staged and a wealthy producer is behind her. In January the LabourMan channel posted a clip titled “The whole truth about Karina the streamer”, where the creators called the project “a financial pyramid” and showed that the first Twitch donations were sent by Nabokov himself to kickstart payments. One might think there’s something wrong with that, but Nabokov denies everything.

In real life Karina is much calmer than on screen. “Well, I just don’t have anything to be angry about right now, although I often shout – at couriers, police, neighbors”. While we sat on a bench by the river in Legnano, only a mosquito annoyed her. “A mos-qui-to bites me! – She stretches the vowels like on streams. – What is this! Let’s get out of here!”

The suburbs of Milan are home to an upper middle class that fills all the restaurants in the evenings. “We’re sitting in a bar, out of eight people here two are dollar millionaires,” Nabokov isn’t afraid to exaggerate. Legnano hosts a D&G textile factory, whose face Karina dreams of becoming. Recently she posted a photo in D&G clothes on Instagram, the post got 45,000 likes, while photos in the official D G community get about 20,000 on average. “You can’t achieve online what you can achieve by becoming the face of a major European brand,” Nabokov believes. “That’s already serious”.

Now Karina streams on Twitch rarely, about once a month. There are three reasons. First, Karina is tired: in her last stream she responds to messages like an automaton, without any interest. Second, she regularly gets banned because of Twitch rules. Third, Karina is testing VKontakte’s service. According to Nabokov, one stream now brings from 15,000 to 100,000 rubles. The hype left with the high ratings: if in January streams were watched by 20,000 people, now it’s only 8,000.

“Twitch doesn’t let you stream properly, it’s boring there,” complains Nabokov. Karina was first banned for switching on “Dom-2” during a live broadcast when a fight was shown. Then for racism – the streamer discussed a video of a Muslim woman teaching how to pluck eyebrows according to the Quran. “At some point Twitch came and said that we broke every rule possible, that we’re Hitler incarnate,” she claims. “We popularized Twitch in Russia. Karina is the only streamer with a page on Wikipedia. They should be hauling bags of gifts to us for that, but they ban us,” continues Nabokov.

He calls Karina “a little Zhigurda”, meaning she became a character who can do anything – users want to watch her. According to him, the gaming audience has almost disappeared. A YouTube video where Karina moves into a new apartment got 1.7 million views, while let’s plays get far fewer.

I ask if Karina is addicted to streaming. She says she’s an introvert by nature and never sought publicity. “I became a blogger, but I don’t behave like a blogger, I don’t take pictures of every **** and I don’t post them”. According to Nabokov, Karina doesn’t care about rankings or how many likes she has. “For her it’s more important to do a daily-quo – a daily quest in World of Warcraft – than to read an article about herself on Wikipedia. She has 200,000 messages on VKontakte, she answers nobody”. He adds: “If we get half a million euros, we won’t stream at all anymore. Why bother when you can lie on the couch and go out to eat”.

Karina blames the audience for her boredom. Messages boil down to requests to sign on a wall and leave a signature. Requests come in comments to posts, in the Twitch chat and in private messages. Recently she practiced a new YouTube trend – a prank-song. A blogger chooses a track and replies to someone with lyrics from it. “We didn’t know what reaction to expect, but definitely not ‘oh cool, sign this wall’ and ‘oh cool, will you do a sig?'”. “They come like to a store,” says Nabokov. For the last stream she had to do 1,300 signatures. “When they used to hate, it was at least interesting,” says Karina. In short, she’s tired of streaming.

– Wait, you’re an idol for schoolkids and you can control them. Jesus led people, you can become a Jesus for schoolkids.

– I don’t want to communicate with them. Nothing can help them anymore.

– Maybe you’ll become a pro player?

– It’s impossible to play professionally and enjoy it. Over time you start to hate it. And besides – a chick can’t play properly, simply physically. What can a woman do? Flash her tits and sit quietly. Everyone does that.

Finally, I ask when she and her uncle will come to Moscow. In Italy Karina is almost unknown, but in Russia many know her. “We’ve been promised all sorts of things. For example, to kill both of us,” answers Nabokov. “And not by schoolkids, but serious men”. “They follow my every step: she went to the store, she fell asleep. They figured out where we live by two pipes on the house and roofs with a satellite. They dissect every frame of our videos,” Karina echoes. Nabokov says many of Karina’s followers are psychos: “We monitor information, the worst is on anonymous boards. The most interesting topic is whether I sleep with Karina or not. There’s even a separate public page with 10,000 people inventing stories about Karina. The founder sometimes gets drunk and goes on Periscope, presenting himself alternately as a producer, an uncle, or a brother. In short, the concentration of crazies is off the charts. It’s a unique community”.

But nothing has changed for Karina. She says she still goes out and spends time with family as before. Only now there’s a lot of work. Games stopped being fun and became routine. Preparing for filming, shopping (“I mainly buy clothes for streams”), replying to ad offers – you have to spend time on all that daily, but it all seems pointless. Recently she was invited to host a show on a federal TV channel. If it works out, Sychyova will become a star not only on the internet. And that will be much more serious.

Source: //neverfold.ru