Kaitlyn Siragusa, better known as Amouranth, began streaming on Twitch in 2016 and started posting videos to her YouTube channel the same year.
The 29-year-old's growth was modest at first — she didn't hit one million Twitch followers until April 2019, and then it took her almost two years to reach two million, according to the data analytics website Twitch Tracker. However, her popularity skyrocketed last year, and she now has over six million followers.
Amouranth became especially known for her gaming content, ASMR, and "hot tub" streams, a Twitch subgenre involving mostly women streamers sitting in a jacuzzi and chatting with viewers for hours.
The hot tub genre — often referred to as Twitch's "hot tub meta" — spiked in popularity and sparked conflicting discourse in 2021. Some people (including star streamers like xQc) criticized the platform for allowing the content to gain traction, while others lambasted those critiques as misogynistic.
"I don't think it's particularly unique or new, just people decided to hyper-focus on it now due to a few girls having outsized success," Amouranth, who was one of the most popular and visible hot tub streamers, told Insider at the time. "People keep succumbing to recency bias as if this recent development has 'forever tarnished' the Twitch brand, or as if at some point in the distant future it's going to be just all hot tub streamers."
Here's how she's navigated her career, both in successes and hardships, over the last year.