Drake’s Twitch stream pulls in massive viewership with gambling content

Rap superstar Drake has now started his own Twitch channel – sort of. As part of his partnership with betting site Stake, he has joined the gambling meta on the Amazon-owned platform.

The gambling meta on Twitch is as popular as it is controversial. Relegated to the ‘slots’ category, which Twitch doesn’t even have a category image for, it has become one of the biggest segments on the whole site. It entered the top 10 categories last month, overtaking the likes of Warzone.

Many of the streams in this section are sponsored by various betting companies. Stake, the “leading crypto casino and sports betting platform”, is one of the more prominent sponsored, paying streamers to play on their site.

Drake locked in sponsorship with Stake, and has been fulfilling his deal with streams on Twitch.

On July 12, he returned on the StakeDrake channel, to complete only his second livestream, joined by French Montana, and this time pulling in a lot more viewers. At its peak, he hit 112,000 concurrent viewers.

Drake has been around Twitch before, such as when he famously streamed alongside Ninja in Fortnite in 2018, also joined by Travis Scott.

On his gambling streams, he’s also been joined by Xposed, a former Call of Duty streamer, to help him settle into the platform.

How often he’ll be streaming on Twitch on the StakeDrake channel remains to be seen, although it’s unlikely there will be much outside of gambling streams occasionally.

There have been calls for Twitch itself to take action against gambling streams, especially due to the risk of children watching. Although Drake’s title said ’18+’, there is no way to actually prevent younger users from viewing the stream.

Last year, Twitch said it was “monitoring” gambling content on the platform, although their statement mostly related to suspicions that some streamers were not disclosing their sponsorship, or that they were playing with fake/house money, rather than all gambling streams.