“Boys! Today, for the first time ever, we are doing an uncapped subathon. I have no idea how long this stream will last…” Twitch streamer Ludwig Aghren said on Sunday, March 14.

 If you don’t know who he is, don’t worry. You are not alone. Ludwig came up about a year ago as a variety streamer on Twitch. He got quite humble starts in the Super Smash Bros melee scene as a commentator/player and worked his way onto being a full time Twitch streamer, something very few people are able to accomplish. 

I’ve been watching Ludwig since January of 2020, and I was instantly drawn to his channel. His branding is sleek, his youtube highlights are entertaining, and he is just a guy who oozes confidence and charisma. 

For a while he had his own niche until this past fall when the party game “Among Us” blew up. He started streaming with bigger and bigger streamers, propelling his views and sub counts skyward. 

This March he decided to go on a week long break and had planned on doing a 24 hour stream to get back into things. At the last minute he decided on an uncapped “subathon”. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitch, this deserves an explanation. On Twitch, subscriptions cost five dollars. Half of the money goes to Twitch, and the other half goes to the streamer. In a subathon, there is a timer that goes up by 20 seconds every time someone subcribes. When the timer eventually runs down, the stream ends. Most bigger streamers will cap it so they don’t have infinite subs/infinite stream time. Ludwig didn’t do that. He had prepared for an overnight stream by getting a racecar bed in his size sent to his house so he could sleep on stream. Seventy-two hours in, as the timer approached 60 hours remaining, the look on his face said it all. He was going to be there for a while.

 So he embraced it. He got a home gym set up and worked out on stream; he put a bathing suit on and showered on stream. He rarely left the camera, and when he did it was only to use nature’s glorious facilities. He did take a 24 hour break at one point to spend time with his girlfriend who was going out of town for a while, but immediately came back and kept going. And the stream kept growing. And growing. And before you knew it, he was THE most subscribed to person on Twitch, beating out the legendary xQCow and the DreamSMP streamer Rainboo. Rainboo peaked at 100,000 subscribers. 

A very dedicated group of statisticians kept track of the money that was coming into his stream.In total, approximately 1.5 million dollars went into his pockets during the subathon. After giving $450,000 to charity, paying his moderators and other help about $850,000, he takes home about $209,000 after taxes (None of these monetary figures are confirmed by Ludwig Ahgren or a member of the Mogul Moves team. All figures are rough).

 There was still time left on the clock and so Ludwig decided to cap the stream at 1 month and leave it there. After all of that there was still one more record to break. 

In April of 2018 during the peak of Fortnite, streamer Ninja played with Drake and set the all time subrecord of 269,000 subscribers. No one thought that anyone could ever top that without huge celebrity appearances. 

Ludwig did it in less than a month of streaming with nothing but his devilish charm. He peaked at 283,000 subscribers. 

As he said in a video recapping the event, no one ever thought that it would ever be topped. He made it: just a melee commentator from a sleepy town in New Hampshire just shooting his shot. Now he’s on top of the world. He is the most popular twitch streamer of this era, one of the most popular of all time. 

On April 14, with tears in his eyes and at a loss for words from the overwhelming gratitude, he gave a salute and faded to black. 31 days later. and the stream was over. Countless records set and broken. Sleep well, Lud. You deserve it, king.