Reaction content has long been a staple of Twitch since the inception of the Just Chatting category in the latter half of 2018. And with the legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard intensifying, top streamers have looked to leverage the reality drama for views.
Depp and Heard’s high-profile divorce has turned the heads of the masses over the past months and much of the current trial between the two has been available to content creators on Twitch to co-stream on their channel. Along with Pokimane and xQc, the platform’s top MMO streamer Asmongold has dedicated a significant amount of his airtime in the past few weeks to watching and reacting to the trial live, leading to massive viewership numbers.
Regularly reaching more than 150,000 viewers while streaming the events of the court room, Asmon in the past 30 days has seen a nearly 30-percent increase in his hours watched over the previous 30-day period and a 43.7-percent bump in average viewers, according to stats from SullyGnome.
The nature of the reality TV has drawn strong reactions from some fans who find the case to be unpalatable. But Asmon made it clear that he doesn’t care what any haters might think about his use of the trial for his stream’s benefit.
Asmongold said on Twitter that he enjoys reading hate threads about himself online, and when a user replied that his reaction-style content during the trial was “weird,” he doubled down on his content strategy by ratioing them with a reply of his own.
This is the final week of the defamation trial between Depp and Heard. In the past week of watching the trial on stream, Asmon has peaked at 160,000 to 175,000 viewers five times. In the past seven days, his 53 hours spent in the Just Chatting category (which is the time he spends co-streaming the trial, among other things) has averaged more than 100,000 viewers with 5.7 million hours watched.
Asmongold is the most-watched streamer in the Just Chatting category over that time frame, beating out other streamers who have also covered the trial, including xQc and HasanAbi.
