Maya Higa's animal sanctuary just dethroned HasanAbi on Twitch.

Maya Higa's animal sanctuary just leapfrogged some of Twitch's loudest personalities. As of June 9, AlveusSanctuary holds 68.6K active paid subs, good for the #2 spot on the entire platform, ahead of HasanAbi, CaseOh and StableRonaldo. The catch: it's a 24/7 nonprofit broadcast of rescued emus, frogs and parrots, not a streamer's face cam.

What actually happened?

The Alveus Subathon 2026 detonated over the weekend. The channel is running a continuous 24/7 stream where every new sub adds airtime and routes money to the sanctuary's animal-care budget, and Streams Charts clocked the channel at 68.6K active subs on June 9. Roughly 61K of those came from gifted subs, per Deltia's Gaming, meaning the surge was a coordinated community pile-on, not a paywall promo.

The A-list raid list reads like a Twitch yearbook. Valkyrae, Ludwig Ahgren, Mizkif, Emiru, Sodapoppin, adapt and Kai Cenat all dropped in, alongside the official Twitch and Riot Games channels. And the broadcast subject? Stompy the emu, Georgie the African bullfrog, and a rotating cast of owls, reptiles and parrots, none of them under contract.

Why does this matter for creators?

Because the personality leaderboard just got mugged by a nonprofit. The entire 2020s creator-economy thesis rests on the idea that audiences pay for a parasocial connection to a specific human. Alveus just hit Twitch's #2 active-sub spot with a stream that has no human face on it. The "show" is the sanctuary itself.

That reframes the unit of monetization. Fans here aren't subbing to Maya, they're subbing to a thing Maya built. That's the difference between a creator economy and a creator-operator economy, and it's a much bigger TAM than 17-year-olds reacting to TikToks.

"OUR SUBATHON JUST ENDED! 2 weeks of uptime, 3400+ subs gained, and over $19,000 raised."

AlveusSanctuary, recapping its 2022 subathon, the run the 2026 effort just dwarfed by roughly 20x.

What's the bigger picture?

This isn't an isolated viral moment, it's the second blockbuster Alveus run in two months. On April 14, Maya Higa became the first Twitch streamer ever to give a main-stage TED Talk, where she revealed her community has raised over $7.5M for conservation and that her streams pulled 250M+ educational views in 2025 alone. That's not a vanity number, that's a real institution riding on Twitch's distribution.

The leaderboard math makes the milestone sharper. Twitch's all-time active-sub record still belongs to Kai Cenat at 1.1M, set when he closed Mafiathon 3 in September 2025. The current monthly #1, per Streams Charts, is Jynxzi at roughly 110K. Alveus is slotted directly behind him, a 15-acre nonprofit in rural Texas running ahead of nearly every entertainment streamer on the site.

What does Fanvault think?

The Alveus run is a clean signal of where the next wave of creator monetization is going, and it's exactly the bet Fanvault is making. A creator is no longer just a person posting content, it's an operator running a small business with a fanbase that wants to fund the mission, buy the merch, bid on the memorabilia, and stick around month after month. Fanvault charges 8% per transaction and lets creators keep 92%, against Fanvue at 15%, Passes at 10% plus $0.30, and Fanfix at roughly 20%. When the model is "build a creator-led organization, then fund it with subs and a storefront," fee economics and an integrated automation layer stop being nice-to-have and start being the whole game.

A nonprofit emu stream just embarrassed most of Twitch's personality top tier. The next Alveus won't need Twitch's leaderboard to prove the point.