The Rise Of Adrianah Lee Has Been Anything But Easy

Adrianah Lee is a streamer with a big personality. She got her start in content creation while she was still in high school, when she and her friends started filming goofy skits and the occasional music video in the hopes of launching their singing careers. Lee wouldn't be the only streamer who's also a musician if she'd stayed on that path, but in the years since then, Lee has left her musical dreams behind and gone on to build a fantastic community of fans and friendly streamers on Twitch.

Lee spends most of her streams chatting and joking with her viewers. When she does play the occasional game, it tends to be "Valorant" or "Minecraft." More often than that, though, she's finding ways to use the internet as fuel for comedy, like traveling through the wacky world of Omegle chat rooms.

It's not all jokes and fun times, however. Lee's faced plenty of struggles in her streaming career. Whether it's the challenge of making a living from Twitch and YouTube, or the frustrations of toxic masculinity in the streaming world, Lee has found a way to face any obstacle in her path and still come out on top. Here are some things you might not know about Adrianah Lee.

Adrianah Lee might just be rising to prominence on Twitch in recent history, but she's been in the content creation game for a long time. She started regularly streaming on Twitch in early 2019, but years before that, Lee was trying out her skills on YouTube. Lee has said she started her YouTube channel in 2014, and her initial interest came from wanting to be a singer. She thought making music videos would be a great way to stay engaged with her singing while also promoting herself.

Lee's music videos are no longer on her channel, but the oldest remaining videos run all the way back to her high school years, when she was examining the intricacies of Tumblr culture and poking fun at high school drivers. When she went to college, she continued making videos for YouTube, but her transition to Twitch was right around the corner. Though her Twitch channel has outpaced her original YouTube channel in terms of subscribers these days, she still keeps the latter alive by posting highlights from her streams.

It's not uncommon for people to make big moves for their career, especially in the entertainment industry. Adrianah Lee grew up in Detroit, but when she decided to make her streaming career her full time focus, she left her hometown behind and set her sights on Texas.

Austin has a large and active community of Twitch streamers, and is home to major content creators like Asmongold, Mizkif, and Maya Higa. Lee didn't pick Austin because she wanted to join that particular scene, though. Her reasons were both more personal and way more practical. 

When a fan asked Lee why she was planning to make the move back in 2020, she said, "A majority of my friends live in Texas, and there's no income tax in Texas, so you bet I'm whipping my a** over there." Lee is always open with her fans about the struggles that come with trying to make a living as a streamer, and her plans have probably helped to give ideas to would-be streamers in her audience. Not long after the Q&A, Lee made the move, and Austin is now her base of operations.  

There are plenty of things that make streaming a more laid back job than other career fields. However, the huge amount of time that needs to be invested, plus the assumption that streamers will be "always on" and open to engaging with their fans on an intimate level, can make managing mental health one of the most dangerous parts of being a streamer. It's something that every streamer has to face at one point or another, but it's not always doom and gloom. Streaming can also help people find friends and communities that they otherwise would have lived without.

Adrianah Lee has firsthand experience with how streaming can actually give someone a boost in their mental health. In November 2020, Lee was celebrating becoming a partner on Twitch, and she took a moment to look back at her streaming career so far and how getting involved with Twitch had completely changed her personal life.

"I remember when I first started streaming, I was streaming off my Macbook Air in my dorm. I was very depressed and very sad," she said. Streaming put her in touch with a huge community of people that she couldn't have met in person. Working with other streamers and building her own community helped pull her out of depression and put her on a new path. 

"I have met some of my closest friends through Twitch," she said, "and my whole life has changed because of Twitch and because of you guys."

Adrianah Lee has always had an interest in film and editing. That's why she gravitated toward YouTube content creation earlier in her life, and that interest carried her into college. When she started her streaming career, Lee was going to film school to learn how to further sharpen her talents.

It's not just on Twitch and YouTube that Lee gets to flex her film muscles and hone her craft, either. She also has a history of taking on professional work, which she has documented on Instagram. As a professional photographer and videographer, Lee's work has taken her just about everywhere you'd expect. She's done prom photoshoots, corporate events, and weddings. She's even helped some of her YouTuber friends in filming their own videos.

Lee's film knowledge has made her something of a perfectionist when it comes to her work. She's complained on Twitter about the difficulty of hiring an editor for her own videos because she has such a specific vision for how she wants everything to look. Every stream and YouTube video is a new opportunity for Lee to work on some aspect of her craft, and her skill shines through in the work that she releases.

Streamers spend more time than anyone online, and their internet knowledge is often much broader than that of the average Twitter user. Adrianah Lee has turned her chronic internet residency into an opportunity for new kinds of content. Omegle is an anonymous text- and camera-based chat service that launched over a decade ago. Some might think that the site is past its prime now that there are endless places for people to connect online, but Lee has realized that Omegle is just as entertaining as it ever was — and she has used it to get laughs out of her viewers for years.

There's no way to know what you're going to find when you start rolling through Omegle's chat rooms. The first Omegle segment that made its way to Lee's YouTube channel got great reactions in the comments section, with fans getting a huge kick out of even the smallest interactions, like when a group of girls realized they'd accidentally landed themselves in a YouTube video.

Since then, Lee's Omegle segments have become one of the main draws to her channel. Whether she's soldiering through chats alone or bringing along a friend to help her troll guys, Lee always has some hilarious interactions.

Though she's best known as a streamer, Twitch might not be the platform where Adrianah Lee has garnered the most attention. She's been using her streams as a source of content for TikTok, and her audience has grown on that platform exponentially. She's topped 100,000 followers on TikTok, receiving over a million likes on her videos.

The content that works best for Lee on TikTok tends to be the same as what pulls in the most viewers on her other platforms. Lee doesn't often play games on her page, but a "Minecraft" highlight clip is one of her most viewed TikToks. People also showed up in droves to watch her roleplay as a real Texan, and just like her YouTube channel, TikTok gets to see all the "greatest hits" from her adventures on Omegle.

Lee's TikTok videos are really just bite-sized doses of everything that she does on Twitch and YouTube. The fact that she's gained such a sizable following in such a short period of time goes to show how much exposure TikTok can offer, as well as how much fun her output can be. Part of what's kept Lee successful as a streamer has been her willingness to experiment with different platforms and to consistently try out new strategies to reach her audience.

Every year, streamers gather to hang out, network, and have fun at TwitchCon. Adrianah Lee vlogged her first pass through the event in 2019, the same year that she started appearing on Twitch full time. For the most part, Lee had a typical first TwitchCon experience: She got to explore a new town, eat at some nice restaurants, and meet a whole new group of friends. Her vlog is cheerful and upbeat, but there was one not-so-great event that didn't happen on camera.

"The only time I almost physically beat somebody up was at TwitchCon," Lee said in response to a question from one of her viewers. According to her, the almost-fight happened at the big TwitchCon Party. Lee was dancing with her friends when a stranger came up and yanked on her hair. Lee didn't take it well, and she was ready to throw down. Luckily her friends managed to talk Lee out of confronting the other girl directly, and instead they watched as she moved through the crowd and caused more problems for other groups until someone else handled the situation.

It can be hard to make ends meet as a small streamer. Paychecks aren't even close to being consistent front month to month, and on top of that, you have to manage things like saving money for taxes. Adrianah Lee has always been open with her viewers about the times when she's struggling to pay her bills, but she's also found some creative ways to make the most from her streams.

Back in July 2021, Lee had some firsthand experience with the one of the biggest challenges that comes with being self-employed. She'd filed her taxes earlier that year and eventually heard from the IRS that she owed $3,000 in taxes that an employer would have typically pulled from her regular paycheck. Lee's solution to the problem found its way to YouTube, where she laid out her thought process to her fans. She hilariously explained that she'd decided to follow the "hot tub meta" because there are "2 things you can't run from, e-girls and taxes."

With one disaster averted, Lee was able to continue on until life threw her another challenge. While struggling to come up with enough money for rent, Lee decided to do an ASMR stream to bring in some extra money. "I feel really bad for my viewers who normally watch me," she said at the time. However, judging by the comments on her ASMR video, they were plenty entertained by the stream.

Of course, hot tub streams and extended ASMR sessions can only take a person so far. Even though streamers need to put in a ton of hours to succeed, putting in those hours is no guarantee of financial success. Adrianah Lee showed her fans on Twitter that she's been working over fifty hours a week on her content creation, but even with all that time put into her work, she's struggled in the past to make a living from Twitch alone.

A few weeks after that update, she told her fans, "Recently the numbers just aren't there anymore, people are spending less time on Twitch." Lee also said that she was having trouble finding other Austin-based streamers to collaborate with her. Ultimately, Lee had to pick up two different day jobs so she could pay the bills, but she continued to put in more than a full time job's worth of work each week into her streaming and content. The challenge of making it as a streamer can be intense, but Lee isn't giving up on her dreams anytime soon.

Adrianah Lee has become the center of a controversy involving fellow streamers CrazySlick, Maya Higa, and Mizkif, one of the founders of OTK. Back in 2021, Lee wrote a Twitlonger post describing a party where she said CrazySlick touched her inappropriately while she was asleep. The post got renewed attention in September 2022 when Trainwrecks accused Mizkif and Maya of working to cover up the incident.

Since then, Lee has been talking with her viewers about everything that happened and sharing new information, including a clip of Mizkif downplaying the incident and calling it "sexual harassment at a low scale." Fans have also been reaching out to Lee on Twitter and sharing their own bad experiences with CrazySlick, to which Lee has said, "he was protected for years and people were afraid to go against him because of the monopoly that group had over Twitch."

This controversy has thrown Lee more into the public eye, but this is far from the only time that she's addressed the fact that there's rampant harassment and mistreatment of women in the streaming space. She's commented on Twitter about how male streamers often ask women about inappropriate topics when they're streaming together, and has pointed out that anytime she has a female friend on her stream, men start asking for them to kiss or wrestle. 

This kind of harassment hasn't slowed Lee down from being there for her fans, and the outpouring of support she's received shows that the community she's built stands with her.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).