Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed Are Doing Another Marathon. Their Last One Added 586,000 Twitch Followers to Speed's Channel, More Than Double What Kai Gained.

Aug 19, 2026 · ShinyPull Team

IShowSpeed just scheduled a new stream with Kai Cenat, titled "NOT ENDING UNTIL WE BEAT EVERY GAME ft. Kai Cenat," set to go live August 20. It's their second marathon together this month. The first one, a five-day Minecraft Hardcore run that wrapped August 12, already left a real mark on both of their numbers. It just didn't leave the same mark on each of them.

Round two, one week later

On August 7, Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed locked themselves into a single continuous Hardcore Minecraft world, racing to kill the Ender Dragon, the Wither, the Elder Guardian, and the Warden without the run resetting. It took five days and 42 deaths between the two of them before they finally closed it out on August 12. Now they're doing it again, this time with the games still a secret and one rule already locked in: the stream doesn't end until they finish whatever it turns out to be.

The new announcement was trending on X within two hours of going up, already pulling close to 900 posts before either of them had streamed a single second of it. That kind of reaction is exactly why a second marathon makes sense in the first place. We checked what the first one actually did to their numbers on Twitch, the platform where both of them ran it live.

What the last one did to their watch hours

IShowSpeed's Twitch channel logged 70,185 hours watched on August 1. By August 19, that number was 4,509,403 hours, a jump of roughly 64 times inside one month, almost entirely inside the ten days the marathon covers and its immediate afterglow.

Kai Cenat's channel moved too, from 1,165,052 hours on August 1 to 9,412,953 hours on August 19. That's real growth, roughly 8 times over, but nowhere close to Speed's multiple. Kai already runs one of Twitch's biggest channels every day of the year, marathon or not. Speed mostly doesn't. The marathon is close to the only reason his Twitch hours moved at all this month.

Speed's channel grew faster, even though it's much smaller

Followers tell the same story from a different angle. IShowSpeed picked up 586,387 new Twitch followers between August 1 and August 19, taking his channel from 5,432,327 to 6,018,714. That's just under 11% growth in under three weeks. Kai Cenat added 239,052 over the same stretch, going from 21,409,217 to 21,648,269, a little over 1% growth on a much bigger base.

Speed's channel is a fraction of the size, and it still gained more than double the new followers Kai's did, on the same stream, during the same event. A marathon on Kai's channel works as a Twitch on-ramp for an audience that mostly knows Speed from YouTube and TikTok and never had a reason to open Twitch for him before.

Where they actually stand, platform by platform

Zoom out to every platform we track and the picture flips.

Kai Cenat is the bigger name on Twitch by a wide margin, more than three and a half times Speed's following there. Everywhere else, Speed is the bigger name, by enough that his combined total across all three platforms comes out to roughly 1.75 times Kai's. The marathon works because it puts Kai's format in front of Speed's audience and lets Speed borrow Kai's home turf for a week at a time.

What to watch this time

The first marathon moved real numbers for both of them, and it moved Speed's Twitch presence by far more than Kai's, simply because Speed was starting from so much less of it there. If August 20 plays out anything like August 7 did, expect another spike in both of their hours watched, and another one that lands harder on Speed's side of the split screen than on Kai's.

Both of their channels come out ahead, just by very different margins. Kai's 8x on hours watched and 1% follower bump are real numbers for a channel his size. Speed's 64x and 11% are the kind of move a channel only sees when it's mostly dormant the rest of the year and then spends ten days riding someone else's audience. The games for August 20 haven't been announced yet. Going by the last one, the numbers already have a pretty good idea of who has more to gain from finding out.

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