Above: IShowSpeed, Darren Watkins Jr, exults in Port of Spain as his fans cheer around him. All images are screencaptures from the livestream from Trinidad and Tobago on April 25, 2026.

BitDepth 1561 for May 04, 2026

The hot blast of iShowSpeed’s visit to Trinidad and Tobago, and indeed, the wider Caribbean, stirred the tea of several sedentary armchair and behind-the-steering-wheel critics.

Young adults who still thought of themselves as au courant with modern culture were left flatfooted, astonished by the spectacle of teens and preteens chasing after an athletic young African-American man thundering through their familiar landscape, trailing excitement and KFC chicken bones behind him.

I’m comfortable with my ignorance. I’m hovering on the edge of the fourth stage of my life, the five being blissful ignorance and excitement (until 25), adulting (25-40) middle-aged terror and bemusement (40-55) elder status (up to around 70) and finally, “he still alive?”

Knowing who IShowSpeed is, therefore, is not particularly high on my list of priorities, the question remains though, should it have mattered to anyone outside of his local fanbase?

It appears that our tourism agency chose not to participate in this project, which apparently commands a high price for visibility in its tightly produced, madcap style.

Expedia partnered as title sponsor with Darren Watkins Jr to promote a 2026 travel campaign titled Exspeedia, led by a website.

Expedia, founded by Microsoft in 1996 and spun off as a public company three years later, is now a major independent force in the travel industry, with gross profit in 2025 of US$12.9 billion.

That’s not the sort of company to idly throw money behind a 21-year-old social media star, footing the bill for him to fly from country to country, flitting like a literal social butterfly through each country’s cultural mix.

There are dozens of countries and locations within larger nations that log, on Expedia’s microsite map, where Watkins has been on his journey, though interestingly, neither Jamaica, Barbados nor Trinidad and Tobago is listed as completed destinations on the map of his globe spanning trip.

That raises questions about how the weighting of his journey is being captured. Does national funding of his visit play a part in official recognition of a visit on the Expedia map?

No country in the Caribbean on the Exspeedia map includes images of his visit to the region. Is the size of the local audience, and the potential market, a factor in that decision-making?

Pondering that gently rotating map of Watkins’ shenanigans is probably missing the point though.

Expedia is targeting Gen Z travellers, children born between 1997 and 2012 who represent the first truly digital native marketing target and one that has come to maturity taking the connectivity and revelatory power of the internet for granted.

In choosing Watkins as their standard bearer for a particularly energised and full-tilt approach to tourism, the numbers certainly support his selection.

Watkins has 53 million subscribers on YouTube. His views for his Trinidad and Tobago visit alone clocked 4.8 million views for a five hour and 47 minute stream.

Watkins meets the elders

That livestream event was carefully managed, pulling together a who’s who of backstage talent and creative strategy, including a diverse list of participants which included Che Kothari, Machel Montano’s manager, cultural elder Eintou Pearl Springer, Peter Minshall and Lost Tribe bandleader Valmiki Maharaj.

Just four days later, the extended pump of Caribbean vibes deflated even the adamantly indefatigable Watkins, when after hitting four islands in a row, he collapsed in Sint Maarten, prompting coverage from as far away as The Times of India.

Who is IShowSpeed?

Darren Watkins Jr initially came to internet prominence during Covid19 lockdowns when he became known for his vigorous live-streaming antics when playing online games.

What followed were a string of altercations between Watkins and gaming platforms, which responded to his more outrageous outbursts by suspending or banning him from their platforms.

By the age of 17, he was arrested by police officers during a livestream after another gamer “swatted” him, calling in the police with a fake emergency call to his location.

Later that year, he would be named Breakout Streamer of the year at the Streamer Awards. His style is riveting, popular and polarising.

A natural athlete who has been coached by Ato Boldon, Watkins followed his enthusiasms into the worlds of professional football and Wrestlemania, gaining wider appeal and more diverse followers.

By 2025, Rolling Stone named him its Most Influential Creator of 2025.

The local impact

Like a stone skipping across a pond, Watkins’ visit left behind ripples of notice, some approving, some disapproving, many simply confused.

Collectively, local media had no idea what to make of the whole event. So-called in real life (IRL) video production on this scale and at this pace, staged to minimise downtime and to keep activity onscreen during six hours with no cutaways and advertising breaks demands the kind of planning, the preparation of human resources and physical assets that doesn’t happen on a budget with a DJI Osmo or an Insta360 on a selfie-stick.

Watkins’ visit to Trinidad, beginning in St James and ending at the Savannah, described a quite limited selection of the country’s greatest hits.

An IShowSpeed smorgasbord

But this dramatic bypass of audience attention, which required no local media presence at all isn’t to be underestimated by anyone working in local media.

The IShowSpeed team appears to have issued no press releases, courted no local media attention and proceeded with their production on the basis that they brought all the eyes they needed.

Watkins isn’t the first streamer to mine some aspect of TT culture for viewer numbers. Chris Must List, a YouTuber with a taste for gangland danger, managed to get himself not just on the radar of local police officers, but behind the bars of local lockup on sedition charges for his bold and extremely ill-advised wanderings into gang territory.

He emerged with video that got him views, but he could have just have easily been carried out of those no-go zones riddled with bullets if he’d met a gang banger with an assault weapon on a bad day.

Then there’s Zoe, widely reviled as the “vanilla vagrant,” who raised her online stakes by getting involved in the TriniBad music scene then rather poutily tried to dismiss the whole IShowSpeed roadshow, because people wouldn’t respond the same way if he was white. The dragging that resulted was substantial.

Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada specifically lined up cultural assets and entertainments that aligned with the participatory modus operandi of the star of the IShowSpeed show. Grenada in particular seemed to have picked up Watkins’ affinity for a J’Ouvert style experience.

Visit the Caroni Swamp for a languid evening of watching the wildlife? Never happen. Watkins would have been jumping at a mangrove branch trying to climb it.

Grab a stick and try to hit someone with it? Whatcha call it? Kalinda? Yeh man, lewwe go!

From that point of view, the support team for the TT leg of Watkins’ visit was relentlessly on point. Just watching the stream for 15 minutes is enervating if you don’t live life at that pitch and, well, speed.

What would the sheer number of viewers of his time in Trinidad mean for tourism? Probably nothing. What Watkins experienced is not institutional, it was artfully but temporarily staged.

A casual visitor to this country has no way to gather those resources or any way of paying for them on the average tour budget.

All this happened because the weight of Watkins’ numbers pushed the right buttons locally, but very little else is capable of doing that. A cruise ship full of tottering boomer passengers whose capacity to keep up with TT culture peters out at a limbo bar set four feet high.

If a planeload of Gen Z travellers decided to follow the IShowSpeed path into Trinidad they would end up sorely disappointed by the year-round menu of languid entertainments on offer. The pump left on Watkins’ private jet and it won’t be back until December at earliest.

Meanwhile, as we share buzz over the dramatic numbers that his tour has left in its wake, it might be useful to consider who profits from all this excitement.

Hopefully, Watkins has advisers who have shaped his tour agreement to ensure he is properly rewarded for being 21, wild and good-looking.

Expedia is clearly not playing around with devising an efficient travel booking platform to support their investment in the tour, offering IShowSpeed fans an opportunity to meet him on his madcap billiard-ball-unleashed travels across the globe and encouraging exploration of his many destinations.

How many of these destinations will directly profit from his explosive arrivals and 3X streamed tours is unclear.

Watkins is a particularly effective stone skipping across a pond the size of the world and the ripples, counted using views and reach are certainly impressive, but eventually he will come to rest and sink. What happens after the hype dies?

The livestream can be found here.