From Speed’s Streams to Dylan Page’s Feed: Why the World’s Biggest Creators Are Flocking to Addis Ababa
From viral livestreams to influencer summits, a growing number of global creators are discovering a city that has been quietly reinventing itself for a decade.
The city sits at 2,355 metres above sea level, high enough that IShowSpeed visibly gasped for air during his five-hour broadcast there on 13 January 2026, describing the sensation as moving in “slow motion.” He had just eaten raw beef at a local restaurant. More than 257,000 people were watching live, and by midnight, his YouTube subscriber count had risen by 410,000, the largest single-day spike of his 20-country Africa tour. The next morning, rapper, streamer DDG posted to X: “I need to go to Ethiopia.” Two months later, he was there. By May 2026, TikTok’s number one news creator, Dylan Page (“News Daddy,” 19.3 million followers) had touched down too, and Addis had hosted the African Social Media Influencers Summit, 200 creators from 30 countries, 470 million collective followers, all converging on the same city.
The obvious question is, why here? Nairobi has more startups. Lagos has more money. Cairo has more monuments. But Addis offers something none of those cities can replicate in combination: a subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cwb) that holds between 15°C and 23°C year-round, generous sunshine averaging 12 hours per day, and temperatures that almost never exceed 80°F or fall below 42°F. For IRL streamers running 5-hour street broadcasts, that is a studio with an open roof. The altitude that made Speed lightheaded is the same altitude that keeps the city temperate while the lowland capitals around it bake.
Addis is also, structurally, a boomtown mid-transformation. Its population reached 5.7 million in 2024, up from 3.6 million in 2020, and generates 29 percent of Ethiopia’s urban GDP, a national economy worth $59.5 billion in 2024. The informal employment share collapsed from 37 percent in 2003 to 6.6 percent by 2020. New prestige infrastructure, waterfront corridors, science museums, and the Adwa Victory Memorial are displacing the high-income residential belt upward into new districts, generating the tax revenue that finances a comprehensive social floor.
That social floor is not rhetorical. The city’s school feeding programme, launched as a 2019 pilot with 70,000 students, now reaches 779,000 children across all public elementary schools and has generated employment for over 10,120 women as decentralised kitchen operators. It is, by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact’s assessment, the first city government anywhere to create a dedicated budget line for universal elementary school feeding. The same administration operates 20 public feeding centres across the city for elderly, disabled, and youth residents, inaugurated by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Mayor Adanech Abiebie in September 2023. The city bus network, 1,500 vehicles, 172 routes, one million daily boardings, runs on a deliberately subsidised flat fare, with a new Bus Rapid Transit Line 2 corridor co-financed by the French Development Agency to reduce subsidy dependency over time through volume.
The environmental side of this compact is equally deliberate. Addis is a member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and has committed to halving its CO2 emissions in alignment with a 1.5°C pathway. Ethiopia’s national grid runs on 100 percent renewable energy, overwhelmingly hydropower, and the country has pledged a 69 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 with a net-zero target for 2050. Within the city, the flagship environmental project is the Sheger River Corridor, a 51-kilometre green belt running from Mount Entoto to the Akaki River through the Kebena and Ginfile rivers, rehabilitating waterways that three decades of rapid urbanisation had reduced to sewerage spillways. A parallel 5 million euro Italian government-funded restoration of the 5.4-kilometre Kebena riverbank is underway alongside a UN-Habitat community programme building plastic and organic waste collection chains to protect the same waterway. The morning runners and the night walkers that streamers document are running and walking along what was, a generation ago, an open sewer.
The city’s human geography adds the final layer. Addis hosts more than 70,000 registered urban refugees, 92 percent Eritrean, followed by Yemenis, Somalis, and Congolese, within a national total of over one million registered refugees, making Ethiopia the second largest refugee-hosting country in Africa after Uganda. The Mixed Migration Centre estimates 80,000 self-reported Eritreans in the capital alone. Sudan’s civil war, since April 2023, now producing the largest displacement crisis globally at 11.7 million displaced by November 2025, has deepened the flow. What this creates on the streets is a civilisational crossroads: Eritrean cafés, Yemeni craft sellers, Somali restaurants, Lebanese and Syrian entrepreneurs in the new commercial corridors. Time Magazine’s 2025 reporting documented refugees building businesses and winning university scholarships, weaving into the city’s fabric rather than existing parallel to it. For a streamer’s one-hour live window, every street corner is a conversation whose origin story spans three countries and two conflicts.
What the streamers are finding and what the numbers confirm, is that Addis exists in a category with almost no rivals: a megacity with mild air, walkable streets, sub-$10 restaurant meals, a government that feeds 779,000 schoolchildren and cleans its rivers by international grant and national budget line, a young population (literacy rate 93.8 percent, 48 percent female representation in elected local government as of 2024) that co-ordinated a digital flag, bombing campaign to drive a streamer’s concurrent viewer count past 257,000, and a political geography that makes it the last stable major capital in a neighbourhood that has largely fallen apart. You can manufacture viral moments in many cities. You cannot manufacture a city that has waited this long, this patiently, to be seen.
The sequence from January to May 2026 forms a trend, not a coincidence: IShowSpeed generating over 120 million YouTube views across the Africa tour with Addis as its statistical anomaly; DDG arriving two months later, hosted by Ethiopian Airlines and Kuriftu Resorts; Dylan Page arriving in May as Africa’s largest influencer summit ran in the same city the same week. Addis was not even on the original itinerary. It was lobbied on by a Pan-African creator who knew what the algorithm would do when it finally pointed at a city that had been building something real, block by block, school meal by school meal, riverbank by riverbank, for the last decade. That is not tourism gravity. That is compound interest.