Between 14 March and 13 April 2021 a streamer called Ludwig Ahgren ran a subathon, a broadcast where every new subscription added time to the clock, and stayed live for 30 days. He ate on stream and slept on stream, and he finished with roughly 282,000 subscriptions and the record for the most concurrent subscribers Twitch had seen, a record that had stood since 2018.
Almost nobody watched the whole month, and the length was never meant to be consumed. The length was the event. A month of continuous broadcast is the one format in which a person cannot maintain a persona, and I think that, not the gameplay, is what people showed up for. You cannot perform for 30 days. Whatever is left after the performance runs out is the thing the audience came to see.
None of it was new. Television invented the subathon in 1999, in the Netherlands, and called it Big Brother: strangers in a house with the cameras running all day, the whole proposition being that nobody can hold a character together for three months. By August 2023 the format had produced 508 seasons in more than 63 countries and regions. Nobody was ever short on drama, drama is cheap. What a season buys you is character revealed slowly enough to be believed.
A business can't run a subathon, but it can notice what the subathon proves. Time on camera is where character shows, and character is the only thing an audience will lend to. An hour on a live call with a customer reveals more than a year of posts, because the hard question gets asked and the answer can't be scheduled. A live shopping stream is the same mechanism compressed into an evening: attention gets people into the room, the hour is where the host says out loud that this particular one isn't worth the money, and the viewer decides for themselves what that honesty is worth.
Short form is where you get discovered. Long form is where you get believed. The people who ran the experiment for 30 days and for 508 seasons came back with the same result, and attention was never the product.
Figures verified 5 September 2026 (Wikipedia: Ludwig Ahgren; Big Brother franchise).