Twitch star Sodapoppin’s mom thinks his early streaming earnings were ‘fake’, ‘thought it was like Monopoly money’

In a recent episode of the Punching Down podcast, Sodapoppin goes through his first chapter with his mother streaming media careers, including how unclear the concept of making a living online was when the industry was in its infancy.

“I didn’t know PayPal was real,” she said. “I thought it was like fake, like Monopoly money.”

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She remembers telling a friend: “Oh, he has some money, but I don’t think it’s real money.”

Sodapoppin was streaming before he was 18, and the only structure his family could think of was what it might look like. One of the first defining moments was when high-spending World of Warcraft players in Dubai started sending large amounts of money via PayPal.

Sodapoppin remembers one of the donations amounting to $10,000, and comments on it almost entirely from the perspective of a naive teenager who had just discovered that there was a real world and that it could be his job. In an interview about his career on Dexerto, his mother said she didn’t know how to conceptualize that people could play in the bedroom,

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The lack of faith is not limited to the Sodapoppin family. In the same episode of the podcast, he recounts the experience of early streamers who faced systemic opposition to the legality of streaming income from banks and landlords who would not accept PayPal donation-based income as a valid and reliable source of income. When he provided bank statements as evidence of income, he was met with incomprehension.