Streamers on the Rise: Frogan talks girlypop gaming, activism, and ‘Ayyrabs’

Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.

---

Frogan had to quit streaming.

She was on the cusp of getting her master’s degree in public health, and her thesis was looming.

“[M]y advisor was basically like, ‘If you don’t give me a draft by next week, you’re not graduating on time,'” she tells Tubefilter. So, “I quit streaming. I was like, ‘I’m just going to focus on my thesis so I can graduate.'”

Frogan wasn’t a full-time streamer at that point, but it was something she enjoyed. She’d grown up a self-described “girlypop” gamer, who played things like Nintendogs and Animal Crossing. As she got older and continued to game, she ended up finding Twitch–and HasanAbi, who at the time was streaming Fortnite to a much smaller audience than he’s got today. Some friends encouraged Frogan to start her own channel, so she did. But leaving was best for her academic career.

And she didn’t stay gone. In summer 2021, degree earned, she came back to Twitch.

“I started streaming again, and I haven’t stopped since” she says. “I went viral on Reddit or a clip of somebody calling me a fake Muslim, and then I just started getting more viewers.”

A few months later, in November, she hit partner. That same day, Hasan raided her stream, and that “basically changed my career,” she says.

In the two and a half years since, Frogan has built an audience of nearly 60,000 followers on Twitch and 13,000 on TikTok. Her streams have evolved into a mix of Just Chatting, gaming, and reaction content, and she’s putting her degree to work with public health advocacy–something she’s considering carrying over to her videos on TikTok. She’s also started a podcast, Ayyrabs, with friends CapriSunnPapi and Raffoul Ticket.

“We focus on pop culture, but we also focus on our personal experiences and stories we have depending on the week,” she says. “We’ve just been trying to delve into it, because I feel like we have a lot to say and we want to platform our opinions. We even get political too, a lot of the time, as well, which I feel like a lot of podcasts are shying away from. All of us have been active voices on social media to the point we’ve been targeted for our opinions, so we started this podcast.”

Some of Frogan’s most recent activism involved joining the Creators for Palestine fundraiser, which to date has raised more than $560,000 for charities providing direct aid to Palestinians.

Check out our chat with her below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tubefilter: Very nice to meet you! I would love to just start with, for anybody who’s reading this and doesn’t know anything about you, can you give me a little bit of background about you, and where you’re from, and how you got into gaming?

Frogan: Yes. My name is Frogan. I’m 27 years old. I’m originally from Detroit, Michigan, but now I live in LA. I started streaming in October 2021. I was in grad school, and I was playing games like Fall Guys with my friends, and I was like, you know what? I might as well stream it. January 2021, I quit streaming because I had to write my thesis.

Tubefilter: What was your thesis?

Frogan: I got my master’s in public health.

Tubefilter: You do a lot of advocacy around public health too, right?

Frogan: Yes. Whenever I had to do my thesis, my advisor was basically like, “If you don’t give me a draft by next week, you’re not graduating on time.” I was like, “Okay.” I quit streaming. I was like, “I’m just going to focus on my thesis so I can graduate.” I graduated, and then in the summer of 2021, around the end of July, I started streaming again, and I haven’t stopped since. I went viral on Reddit or a clip of somebody calling me a fake Muslim, and then I just started getting more viewers.

Then in November of 2021, I got partner, and HasanAbi is a mentor of mine. The day I got a partner, he raided me, and that basically changed my career.

Tubefilter: Tell me a little bit more about your Hasan experience. That’s very cool.

Frogan: I’ve been watching Hasan since he was on Facebook in 2016. One day, in the summer of 2018, I saw him tweet that he’s live on Twitch, and I was like, “What the fuck is Twitch?” I downloaded Twitch and I made an account, and at the time he had 10 viewers. He was just playing Fortnite.

Tubefilter: Back in the day. So you quit streaming to do your thesis. Understandably. Graduated and went back to streaming. Did you have a job then too?

Frogan: When I started streaming again in the summer of 2021, I was working as a scientist. I did a lot of community-based research. I streamed while doing that job full-time until April of 2022. I put my two weeks in and I’ve been a full-time creator since.

Tubefilter: You were working throughout at least the early years of the pandemic?

Frogan: Yes.

Tubefilter: How did that go for you?

Frogan: It was a struggle. It got to a point where, whenever I was considering going full-time, I wanted to make double what I was making as a scientist for four consecutive months to make sure I’d be fine. I thought my boss was going to fire me.

Tubefilter: Really?

Frogan: Yes. I used it as a push to make myself do full-time. It was also getting to a point where I was exhausted. I was working 9:00 to 5:00, and then I would take a nap and I would stream 9:00 to 3:00 AM and it would just be like a cycle of microsleeping.

Tubefilter: Which is terrible for you. You quit, you put in your two weeks, you went full-time because you had that stability with income.

Frogan: Yes.

Tubefilter: Then how did things change for you when you went full-time? How did things change for you with your work-life balance, with your streaming schedule, with your audience growth?

Frogan: My audience grew significantly after I quit. Weirdly enough, it died down a little bit, low-key. It touches on, I don’t know what’s going on. After the initial quit, I felt like it was the best year of my career. In 2022, I did a lot of reality show reacts and people loved that. It was primarily Sister Wives when I did it. To be honest, I felt like I became nocturnal since I was a night streamer. I was just asleep during the day. I finally was able to catch up on my sleep when I wasn’t working a full-time job too.

Tubefilter: I was going to say, I was surprised if you had a full-time job in health and then came home in streams. That is immensely stressful.

Frogan: The easy thing is I worked from home.

Tubefilter: That helps. Were you into gaming as a kid?

Frogan: I consider myself a good girlypop gamer. Like the Nintendogs, the Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing: Wild World was my first game I ever picked out on DS. Growing up, I used to play Tekken and Grand Theft Auto with my brother.

Tubefilter: I don’t know if Grand Theft Auto is really girlypop core. [laughs]

Frogan: Yes, dude. I love that game so much. But girlypop back in the day, and then as I got my own PC, I used to play Fortnite on my phone, to be honest. Once I found Fortnite, I played Fortnite on my phone, but then all my friends in Discord were like, “Just get a PC, you’re always on your laptop anyways, why don’t you just get a PC?” Then I bought one. Then I started doing the shooters, Fortnite, Fall Guys. I don’t know, I just play whatever my friends play now, but Helldivers is my current addiction.

Tubefilter: I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks appealing.

Frogan: You need to. I swear, I think it’s my favorite game I’ve ever played.

Tubefilter: What makes it your favorite?

Frogan: I guess I love that it’s co-op. It’s just funny, you have to save the Super Earth universe, and everybody’s working towards liberating the planets. I guess, as a game, it just feels challenging. I feel like with

Valorant, for me, it just felt very repetitive and long. Fortnite, I got bored with it. I felt like I was playing with bots, but this game actually gives me the challenge I want.

Tubefilter: You play Lethal Company at all?

Frogan: Oh my god. Yes. I was obsessed with Lethal Company too. Yes. It was so amazing. And I used to do Crowd Control, so Chat could pay bitties to add random monsters or loot, and it was so funny. Then that died out.

Tubefilter: Speaking of chat, some streamers really struggle to switch between games because they feel like their audience wants to see them only play one game. How do you manage to develop yourself as a variety gamer?

Frogan: To be honest, I know that I’m mostly a Just Chatting streamer, and I know that my audience mostly wants Just Chatting, so I usually wind down my streaming with gaming because I’m like, “You want to leave? Bye. I just want to play my games.” It’s basically my way of relaxing. I used to care about the drop, but now I’m just like, “I’m just doing what I want to do.” [laughs]

Tubefilter: Do you have a structure of the stuff that you talk about with your chat or does it vary from day to day?

Frogan: I typically do updates on what I did that day, or random stories that happened that day that I forgot to tell them, or that week. Then I go into YouTube reacts. We have a standard cut, MrBeast, and whatever other people are on the trending tab. Then, depending on the day of the week, depending on what show we’re watching, we’ll watch reality TV. I’m in a weird funk. I don’t want to say funk, but I’m trying to rebrand myself and find what works. I just want to reshape my content to make it funner for myself and funner for Chat.

Tubefilter: Do you feel like reaction’s not working out for you?

Frogan: I feel like people are getting bored of it. I just need to find what works.

Tubefilter: I do know reaction content can be quite controversial.

Frogan: Yes, I don’t want to teeter the line of like, you know how some people just sit there and just watch it and add no commentary? I don’t want to get to that point. I feel like reacts are fine as long as you’re adding genuine commentary and react to it.

Tubefilter: Do you have any concrete plans about niches you would like to get into?

Frogan: I’ve been thinking about doing public health streams again. I talk about public health in a casual way on my stream, but I thought about doing it a full stream. It’s just like, I’m trying to figure out a way to make it fun because I feel like it’s very complicated to make information such as something like public health that’s so heavy, engaging, and fun, and have people actually be receptive to it. I’m also playing with the idea of doing it only short-form content like Reels, TikTok, Shorts.

I’m just like, I want to make it engaging. I’ve been meeting with people as well within the industry that have TikTok on lock and trying to make it perfected, if that makes sense, because I’ve done commentary TikToks before and those are the ones that went viral.

Tubefilter: I know you said you had an experience with somebody calling you a fake Muslim. I’m curious about how your experience has been online on TikTok and on Twitch. Do you feel like you have to deal with a lot of those kinds of people?

Frogan: Oh, yes, every day. Not even fake Muslim but like Islamophobia, people talk about how you look every single day, but I feel like I’ve grown numb to it at this point.

Tubefilter: It’s unfortunate you have to. When you go live these days, how many people do you feel like are actively talking to you?

Frogan: In chat, probably 20 to 30, I feel. Usually, it has to be like, “Chat, wake up.” I’m like, “Where are you?” I know people are watching, but not everyone’s going to talk.

Tubefilter: What is your current stream schedule?

Frogan: I started a podcast with two of my best friends, so I used to do it every day, but now I usually stream Monday through Saturday at 5:30 pm PST.

Tubefilter: What made you move to LA?

Frogan: I wanted to be closer to creators. I want to be closer to my friend group. I started with Michigan. I had friends there, but I just wanted to be around other creatives. I just wanted to be within the industry so I could feel inspired, but to be honest, I feel like that hasn’t happened yet.

Tubefilter: Going back to you making public health content, especially with COVID, we just do not have public health resources that people listen to on social media.

Frogan: I feel like social media jaded COVID response. That’s another reason why I’m just like, “Should I even waste my breath?” because I feel like it gave me such a, I don’t want to say distaste, but I can’t think of another word, a distaste towards public health since nobody listened, and they’re so easily swayed, but in reality, the issue was the fact that the people that actually had the data to back themselves didn’t communicate the information in a way that’s easily digestible and understandable for people like the general public. Whereas whenever you look at right-wing propaganda, they talk in plain terms and people digest it easier. Then I’m just like, “I feel like I have a duty to do this.” I’m just going back and forth with it mentally.

Tubefilter: Hank Green also does very very good informational short videos packed with facts.

Frogan: Hank Green saved my life in undergrad. My anatomy physiology class almost took me the fuck out.

One of the things my big TikToker friends recommended to me is to stop recording it at my stream setup and record it on my phone. It makes you look more personal. I’m like, “You know what? I guess I need to try that.”

Tubefilter: Well, I would encourage you to try getting into this. I feel like public health from a true professional, from an expert, is something that we really need. Especially if somebody who truly understands social media, it isn’t just the administration having an account because they think it’s going to reach voters.

Frogan: 100%.

Tubefilter: Any other plans or goals that you have for yourself? I know you want to rebrand a little bit.

Frogan: I want to definitely expand my platforms out. I focus primarily on Twitch currently, and I want to focus more on YouTube commentary, in TikToks, in Reels. For YouTube, I’m gauging doing– Have you watched Cody Ko before?

Tubefilter: Yes!

Frogan: He did a recap series and I want to do that for different reality shows that would be trending. Basically, him reacting to it in 20 minutes versus the hour episode, on top of the public health and everything else.

Tubefilter: I know we’ve talked about some difficult parts of you being online, but what is your favorite part of this whole being online experience?

Frogan: I love the friends that I’ve made. I feel like they’re people I never would have ever met. Considering they’re in so many different places around the world. I also look forward to– This is parasocial, but I look forward to talking to my chat every night. There are days that I feel really frustrated with streaming but I don’t think I ever could quit because I love my community and I don’t want to leave that part of my life behind. Not anytime soon at least.

Tubefilter: Anything else you want people to know about you?

Frogan: Can I push the podcast?

Tubefilter: Absolutely.

Frogan: A big reason as to why I moved out to LA is I started a podcast called the Ayyrabs podcast with my friends CapriSunnPapi and Raffoul Ticket. The funny thing is, I’ve known Capri for a couple of years at this point, but I met Raff in the summer and then I visited LA in August and we all hung out for the first time. We did a stream together and in that stream, I was like, “This looks like a podcast. What if I move to LA and we start a podcast called the Ayyrabs?” Six months later, it happened.

Tubefilter: Tell me more about what the podcast is like.

Frogan: Basically, we’re all Arab. Raff and I are Lebanese, Capri is Palestinian Lebanese. We focus on pop culture, but we also focus on our personal experiences and stories we have depending on the week. So far my favorite episode was the one we did last week. Actually, maybe the one coming out tomorrow and we did it with– We had our first guest. It was Swell Entertainment. We’ve just been trying to delve into it, because I feel like we have a lot to say and we want to platform our opinions. We even get political too, a lot of the time, as well, which I feel like a lot of podcasts are shying away from.

All of us have been active voices on social media to the point we’ve been targeted for our opinions, so we started this podcast. We also want to give Arabs a positive light. It’ll be like, we’re human, we are like you, we’re the same.