Will Airrack Make Award Show History? YouTube Star Eric Decker To Host Streamy Awards With Performance By Yung Gravy

For 12 years, The Streamy Awards has celebrated creators including MrBeast (Creator of the Year, 2020-21), Charli D’Amelio (Breakout Creator, 2020), and Liza Koshy (Breakout Creator, 2016) before they were mainstream. In that sense, the show has almost been like a crystal ball of culture; you see what the future of media looks like before the rest of the world does.

Tomorrow at 6 PM PST, we may also see the future of how award shows get produced and hosted as YouTube sensation Eric “Airrack” Decker becomes the first to host the Streamy’s on his own YouTube channel with over ten million subscribers.

“This year, coming back to an in-person Streamy’s, we’re doubling down on creator input by deeply involving our host and our diverse community in the creative vision of the show,” said Drew Baldwin, who co-founded The Streamy Awards with Joshua Cohen and produces the show with Dick Clark Productions. “When Airrack expressed interest in hosting the Streamy’s on his own channel, this felt like the ultimate validation of creative collaboration and trust.”

With Airrack, The Streamy Awards found a host — and team which includes manager Zack Honarvar, lead editor Mack Hopkins, producer Hayden Trowbridge, and Creative Director Maxwell Behm — who can re-invent traditional media like few creators today.

When I interviewed Airrack earlier this year, it was clear he had a knack for creating content that spoke both to his community as well as popular culture. Case in point: he adapted The Bachelor’s dating format in his “100 Dates in 24 hours” video which now has 14 million views. Airrack’s “I Survived The Arctic With Only 1 Match” is a modern Man vs Wild with over 6.6 million views. And his “Busting 100 Myths in 24 Hours” feels like “Mythbusters” but with an editing and storytelling style that’s so native to YouTube that it has 15 million views and counting.

Knowing that, the sky is the limit for what Airrack and his team will do with tomorrow’s award show — and the viewership they’ll bring — now that they have more creative control than most hosts in recent memory, especially with The Streamy Awards rising in views versus other major award shows with a YouTube viewership with the 2021 show getting over 9.6 million views (43% increase from 2020 to 2021)

Baldwin said giving more control to creators was one of the biggest learnings while producing the show virtually due to Covid-19 these past few years. “Since we couldn’t bring the community together IRL, we asked the creators to produce the show elements themselves — not just acceptance speeches, but nominee introductions and video packages, special moments, and original videos — in their own style.”

“During this time we worked with the community to introduce the Streamys Creator Honors, where past Streamy’s winners directly award a Streamy to another creator of their choice—for their own reasons,” Baldwin continued. “The result was touching and personal and direct, but above all unique—each Creator Honor was completely different than the next.”

In addition to this year’s lineup of awards and Creator Honors, Airrack will be joined by hip-hop artist Yung Gravy, set to perform his hit single, Betty (Get Money). Bob the Drag Queen will surely bring the looks and laughs as the show’s live announcer while Charli D’Amelio, Jay Shetty and other creators will present the night’s awards. And MrBeast will kick off the show with a special video.

Tune into Airrack’s YouTube channel tomorrow (Sunday,December 4th) at 6pm PST / 9 PM ET to see what unfolds and I’ll be sharing more behind-the-scenes, who were the big winners, and more about The 2022 YouTube Streamy Awards in a recap article afterwards.