It's a warm Sunday in Los Angeles, and Imane Anys, better known by her Twitch username Pokimane, is inside, sitting in front of her computer, basked in the pink and orange hues of her ambient lighting, and surrounded by the fluffy soft furnishings and books that decorate her apartment. She giggles as she greets her viewers, giving thanks to her long-time subscribers — 42 months, 68 months — and sings along to the music in her headphones. “Do you guys have eyeball exercises?” she asks into the silent abyss. “I feel like sometimes when I'm on my phone too much, my eyes start feeling really strained." She’s about to spend the next 6 hours and 33 minutes glued to the screen, playing first-person shooter game, Valorant. Over 300,000 people are watching. But gameplay isn't all they've tuned in for.
To her more than 9 million Twitch followers, Anys is Pokimane, the most-followed female broadcaster on perhaps the most popular live streaming platform in the world. Poki — as she’s colloquially known — doesn’t just game, she interacts with fans in real time, discussing everything from therapy to her cats. As a “variety streamer,” her broadcasts blend expert gameplay with laid-back vlogs, Get Ready With Me makeup videos, and the occasional mukbang meal — all delivered with seemingly effortless charisma that belies the work behind her success. The Moroccan-born, Canada-raised, and now LA-based internet personality is Twitch’s answer to Charli D’Amelio — even-tempered and soft-spoken, with a kind, approachable beauty and overarching rose-tinted optimism; a kind of girl-next-door affability that makes users feel they’re FaceTiming a friend. She stands — but more often sits — in stark contrast to many of the stereotypical gamer "bros" once typically associated with the platform.
If Kylie Jenner personifies the luxurious and aspirational influencer lifestyle, Pokimane is the embodiment of the "domestic cozy" inclination that has come to characterize a certain kind of Gen Z state of mind — even if, at 28, she falls outside of that demographic herself. Coined by researcher and consultant Venkatesh Rao back in 2019, the concept describes a retreat into comfortable, intimate spaces: in part a reaction against what he terms the “premium mediocre” lifestyle largely associated with older millennials. Unlike the millennial obsession with highly-polished personal brands, Pokimane’s popularity thrives on the comfort and authenticity she infuses into her streams.
Despite having more than 35 million followers across social media, a speculated net worth of millions, a spot on Forbes' 2021 30 Under 30 list, and a Rolodex of collaborators that includes Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pokimane’s popularity is still paradoxical. To some, she’s a bona-fide celebrity; to others, she’s a nobody. And that’s fine by her. This is domestic cozy in essence: "Drawing on very obscure subcultural references that make no effort to be broadly accessible," as explained by Rao in an interview for TANK. “[It’s] a Very-Online subculture; it’s just not Very Online in ways we are used to. It domesticates, privatizes, and defends the portions of the digital public it claims."
Despite gaming’s prolificity and popularity as an everyday pastime, Twitch culture breeds a hardcore fandom that often feels impenetrable. “It still has remained a bubble or a niche in a way,” Anys tells Teen Vogue when we chat over Zoom in April. “[The culture is] not easy to get into … It’s very particular, and it has a lot of history and lore and dynamics.”
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To its some 35 million daily users, though, Twitch is a lifestyle. With an average watch-time of 95 minutes per day, the platform fosters a unique and intense form of engagement that might seem incomprehensible to those who aren’t readily engaged in it. “People who are in the Twitch sphere are very, very active and heavy users of the platform,” says Anys. “It's very rare that someone will watch a stream once a week. You’re probably watching it every day or not at all.” Last month, a gaming session with Pokimane was auctioned for over $30,000.
It’s this level of dedication that explains why, even if you have no idea who Pokimane is, she’s firmly on the industry radar. Anys is now represented by United Talent Agency, joining a roster that includes Elliot Page, A’ja Wilson, Burna Boy, Megan Fox, and Kylie Minogue. We speak not too long after she returns from Milan Fashion Week with Gucci. Last year, she streamed Moncler’s Art of Genius show live from London, adding to a hefty CV of brand partners including PostMates, CashApp, and HyperX.
“Twitch [was] initially very, very niche,” explains Majid Bahi, CEO of London’s Socially Powerful influencer marketing agency. “It was very community-driven, similar to what Reddit was — and is.” When Anys signed up to the platform in June 2013, at the age of 17, it was all but free from what we now recognise as influencer content, which was still a relatively nascent industry at that time. Most of the brands that had a presence on Twitch were gaming-related — using streamers to advertise their headsets or tech paraphernalia — and streamers could also earn money from monthly subscriptions, a payment plan (that now starts at $5.99) allowing users to access exclusive content and benefits (like ad-free viewing, exclusive emojis and badges).
But in 2017, Fortnite was released, and within less than a year, Pokimane's viewership had tripled, reaching an average of 12,000 viewers per stream. Then came the pandemic in 2020, and — already making enough money to put college on hold and pursue streaming full-time, founding and living in content creation house OfflineTV — Anys found herself in the right place at the right time. Twitch’s average concurrent viewership more than doubled in 2020’s COVID lockdowns. “Streaming and gaming went even more mainstream,” she says. “Gaming became much, much more popular than it had been previously.”
The prevailing image of the gamer has long been that of a nerdy, fashion-averse teen boy sporting thick-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting sweats, but as brands have begun to recognize the potential of gaming, that cliché is subsiding. With the gaming industry’s value estimated at almost $237 billion dollars, and Twitch users now 3x more likely to wear something worn or endorsed by their favorite creator (compared to the average consumer) brands are increasingly pivoting their marketing away from Meta and X, in favor of platforms that many considered to be “fringe” and male-dominated. “They understand that there is still an audience there that needs to buy clothes," says Bahi. And with TikTok’s future looking possibly tenuous, there’s even more potential for Twitch’s value to grow.
In 2021, Balenciaga teamed up with Epic Games for Fornite's first high-fashion collaboration, and Gucci collaborated with 100 Thieves. Last year, Ralph Lauren released a capsule collection with G2 Esports, and Tommy Hilfiger announced its mobile styling game. “For me, it's less so about the intersection of [fashion and gaming],” Anys explains, “and more so about industries and brands and companies really recognizing that gamers are not just people who game, and recognizing the fact that we can be very, very multifaceted and care just as much about fashion or frankly any other hobby … that might typically not align.”
It’s that, and it’s more. It’s a culture shift away from the world of FaceTuned Instagram celebrities and towards more “real,” cringe-embracing creators. Despite the prolificity of influencer content, 51% of consumers admit scrolling straight past it, according to a 2023 study, and 90% would prefer brands to share user-generated content instead. In the eyes of younger audiences, many traditional celebrities, who have built their brand image on being inaccessible, embody premium mediocrity. Perhaps this explains why celebrity presence on Twitch is also increasing — think Nicki Minaj partnering with 22-year-old Kai Cenat, or Drake streaming with Ninja — in response to a a collective disillusionment that has made way for a new breed of creators willing to “free their cringe,” embrace their quirks, and proudly be, for lack of a better word, dorky online.
Pokimane’s online presence has been described by The New York Times as “puckish,” and overarchingly, it’s innocent. Her voice is sweet, almost cartoonish, and measured: our interview is so pleasant, she seems media-trained.
Her “tell-all” podcast, facetiously titled, Don’t Tell Anyone, was originally marketed with cutesy artwork that recalls the tween chick-flick genre: cheeky portraits embellished with infantilised crayon scribbles, and a handwritten title with a love heart dotting the eye. The cover art is cozy and utterly G-Rated: fitting for a lighthearted, “confessions”-style podcast that sees — in its inaugural episode — Anys giggling about boys and breakups for the best part of 30 mins, littered with adjectives like “silly” and “comfy.”
The podcast’s first iteration echoes the domestic cozy vibe of all her content: largely inoffensive, candid, and uncontroversial. She takes a stance against boys with misogynistic views, but even this she manages to handle with light-hearted humor, addressing fetishizing or sexualizing comments in the “unban” videos she makes on YouTube, and assessing whether these users deserve to be unblocked from her chat (her glass-half-full attitude agrees with second chances). She’s frequently compared to an anime character, which has even called her ethnicity into question, but instead of choosing to berate or lecture, Anys actively and jovially engages with such comments, broadcasting her DNA test results in a YouTube video entitled “Is Pokimane Asian? I take a DNA test!”. Her content is largely apolitical and secular; it’s hard to see how she’d significantly rub anyone the wrong way, other than maybe being too nice or un-opinionated, and yet, Pokimane’s innocuous content has become a battleground for the culture wars raging in the public sphere: heated debates over gender and misogyny, social justice, political correctness, privacy, cancel culture, and commercialization converge in the public scrutiny faced by figures like Anys.
“In a lot of new and emerging industries, there are going to be these kind of sensationalized controversies,” Anys says. She’s no stranger to them by now — from “Cookie gate” (dubbed “the most boring streamer scandal of the year” by thegamer.com), which saw her issuing an apology for a “broke boy” quip-back at someone who deemed her $7-per-bag cookie collab to be astronomical, to a clearly sarcastic off-hand comment that "women belong in the kitchen." It’s part of the process when you choose to chat non-stop for several hours straight on live streams, multiple times a week. Anys can say one thing that is then cherry-picked, spun completely out of context, turned into content by others looking to capitalize off her brand name, and used to lambast her.
“There is undoubtedly a pressure to [apologize] when there's thousands of people who are very angry at you,” Anys says. “And it can be very confusing at times to feel like maybe that level of anger doesn't match whatever criticism they might have.” But such is the culture of this content creator economy.
This pinnacle of domestic cozy branding fosters parasocial relationships with fans, who often feel like they are part of Pokimane’s extended family. Not only does this lead to entitlement and on the darker side, major privacy issues, but also heightened emotional reactions when expectations of trust and loyalty are violated. Socially Powerful account manager Ryan Nicholl notes that female influencers in particular face intense scrutiny when they are seen to be profiting from the products they endorse.. "I think [women] do get a disproportionate amount of backlash for these types of things…,” he says. "It's like, 'Oh, this woman is promoting this product, so we're going to, as this Twitch army, be a little bit more hateful.'"
On the flip-side though, Pokimane’s fans are fiercely loyal, which is precisely why her influence is so seismic. “She has a whole community that's like ride or die,” explains talent agent Britt Rivera at Evolved, whose clients include Pinkydoll and top Twitch streamer xQc. Rivera adds, “They're holding her very highly in their hierarchy of values of where they go for entertainment. But that sounds strange to someone who's not used to it.”
Rina, also known as Rinaele, is a 28-year-old Twitch streamer and Pokimane fan who now counts Anys among her followers. “Pokimane is a big girls' girl,” says Rina, explaining how Pokimane supports her community through genuine interaction. She often redirects her own viewers to other female creators’ streams in what’s known as a “raid,” which automatically transfers viewers to another person’s broadcast. “She is raising people all the time,” Rina explains. “Just one stream like this can change somebody’s life, fully.”
But active audience engagement requires serious work and time commitment, and Pokimane’s has entailed years of dedicated effort, a fact easily forgotten amidst her seemingly meteoric rise. “I feel like a lot of people forget and discredit how long she has been working for the success she has now,” says creator and artist Kami, aka Kamikorinaa. “It wasn’t built overnight.” Kami understands that kind of dedication first hand, working hard daily to more than double her Twitch income since January 2024 (she now has 70-85 paid subscribers). And while most of her own experiences have been positive, Kami explains that navigating sponsorships can also be difficult. “It seems like brands take advantage of smaller creators for exposure, and [less] to actually work with them," she says.
As well as being approached by brands, Kami uses TikTok to discover different deals, and uses third party sites like Beacons.ai to help ascertain her market value, and set a fair fee for partnerships. "There’s a calculator for content creators,” she explains, “so you type in the amount of followers that you have, and then you also connect platforms, so it kind of does the work for you." Rina explains there’s still a glaring lack of transparency around how brand deals and sponsorships work. “In reality, one out of 10 deals will work out,” she affirms. “It's just hard. There is no transparency for now.”
Statistically, Pokimane’s story is an exception to the rule. According to leaked Twitch data, the top 1% of paid streamers on its platform received more than half of its $889 million creator revenue in the first nine months of 2021, and three quarters of its earners made less than $120. But regardless, it’s become an aspirational benchmark for many of her fans. ”I feel like Poki's story has been fairly achieved with [the] hard work many of us put [in] daily,” Kami explains. “Anyone is able to get there if they put the hours and dedication she has put into it.” As well as selling products, Pokimane is inadvertently selling a kind of ‘American Dream’ to the creators who look up to her: the idea that with the right amount of work and perseverance, any streamer can achieve her level of success. And her online presence and public persona — “effortless”, effervescent, exciting — makes the pursuit all the more attractive. A 2023 study found that 57% of Gen Z would become social media influencers if they could, feeling that it offers “money, flexibility and fun.”
From very early on, Anys was seriously strategizing, tailoring different forms of content that would appeal to different demographics across social media accounts — sometimes to the detriment of her mental health, with very little concept of any work-life balance. “I feel like I started as a mega fan,” she says of her entry to Twitch. “And then over time, I slowly evolved into just being a mega creator in the sense that I would just be streaming so much that by the time that I was done, I had no will in me to go watch other streams.”
Anys has now perfected her quick-witted Twitter-self, her selfie-orientated Instagram, YouTube for vlogs, TikTok for short-form glimpses into her life, and Twitch for Just Chatting and gameplay. She's a creator who's "constantly evolving," says Nicholl. "Pokimane is an example of someone who isn't afraid to just do different things. ... [That] has allowed her to stay in the spotlight."
Over the course of her 11 year career, Anys has “swapped managers and agents a handful of times,” employed a full-time editor (sometimes a second one) and a personal assistant. "As the workload grows, your team has to grow to match it as well,” she says. “Any substantial thing, truly, truly, truly takes a village." Her podcast team alone — funded completely out of her own pocket at the time that we speak — comprises a producer, a video editor, and a social media manager.
In the last year, Anys uploaded more than 90 videos on YouTube, the majority of these at least 15 minutes long, over 100 Twitch streams, many in excess of 5 hours, and 45 TikToks, and, since December 2023, her weekly podcast. “She is unquestionably a genius businesswoman,” says Rivera. “She’s a great example of someone who started out as a streamer, and then built an empire.”
But there’s still something about lengthy stream-of-consciousness Twitch broadcasts that necessitates a certain candor, and that offers something truly different to other carefully-curated influencer culture. "On Twitch I really am just me,” Anys says. “It's live streaming, you have no choice." It's a long time to be in character.
And so Pokimane is becoming the poster girl for a generation of creators gaining serious traction and slowly emerging from their niche. “The nerds — we've been in the basement,” Rivera affirms. “We've been tucked away in a dark cave, and we're degenerates, and we don't take care of ourselves, or whatever the stigmas are. … And [now] we're in a modern age — where gaming is cool to the people who know that it's cool.”
