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Yogscast, the YouTube and livestream firm based in Bristol, raised a stunning £3.8m for charity with its annual ‘Jingle Jam’ livestream marathon in December. The event has now been running for six year, raising a total of £8.3m in total, with the festive event snowballing in size in recent years.
The event was streamed at twitch.tv/Yogscast for a total of over 700 hours during December. The stream was watched by 2.5m people for a grand total of 6.8m hours – that’s 779 years – with 148,853 individual donations.
The Christmas charity drive was supported by a bumper hamper from Humble Bundle, with over 50 games developers and publishers providing more than 60 games and items.
The charity drive benefited seven pre-selelcted charities, including Special Effect. Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Appeal, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, the Mental Health Foundation, Save the Children, Cancer Research and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Intersex Association -were the other six, though donors did have the option to instead choose from more than 3,000 valuable causes around the globe.
“It’s utterly mind-blowing and so much more than we had anticipated,” said Yogscast CEO Mark Turpin. “but we couldn’t do it without the support of the developers and publishers who donate their games to the Bundle every year.” And Yogscast co-founder Lewis Brindley added, “Every year we think that people can’t give any more and every year it gets bigger and bigger and that’s all down to the incredible community who not only donate but they also help to organise and publicise the Jingle Jam.”
Humble Bundle COO John Graham commented, “Humble Bundle could not be more excited by the $11m we’ve raised for charity by teaming up with Yogscast across our annual December Jingle Jams, including the recent record-breaking promotion that brought in over $5m just last month! I don’t wear hats, but I plan to start so I can tip my cap to the whole Yogscast team!"
