The League of Legends esports season kicked off over the weekend with the world’s top region also leading in viewership. Influencers are continuing to change the shape of Twitch through collaboration and event-based streaming.
Twitch’s Top Channel – TheGrefg
Spanish YouTuber and streamer David “TheGrefg” Cánovas Martínez has become the latest streamer to shatter the platform’s all-time viewership record. More than 2M concurrent viewers tuned in on Jan. 11 to watch the reveal of his official in-game Fortnite skin. The skin is part of the Icon Series which also features Tyler “Ninja” Blevins (a previous viewership record holder who reached 635K concurrent viewers in 2018 during his stream with rapper Drake).
Martínez’s 6.39M hours watched for the week highlights the strong point of Fortnite on Twitch. While average daily viewership for the game may be down over its heyday in 2018/2019, it commands a powerful audience for each and every major event. From the Black Hole to Galactus to the Travis Scott concert, many of Twitch’s strongest category peaks have all come from big Fortnite events.
This most recent event highlights another important recent trend on Twitch: the rise of Spanish streamers. Each week, multiple spots on the Top 10 are taken up by Spanish-language streamers, and their numbers continue to grow. Just this past week, third place was taken by Raúl “AuronPlay” Álvarez Genes.
Twitch’s Top Content – Rust
Over the last two weeks, many regular Twitch viewers steadily saw more and more of their favorite streamers suddenly invest their time in an open-world survival simulation game called Rust. The new trend was kicked off by OfflineTV – a content creation collective that includes a number of powerhouse streamers including Imane “Pokimane” Anys and Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang.
The group created a server within Rust where streamers could play with one another, essentially creating a survival ecosystem populated entirely with popular content creators. In essence, the Rust server is the continuation of the collaboration trend for streamers popularized by Among Us (a category that saw heavy participation from many OfflineTV members).
Where Among Us was limited to 10-streamer pods playing together at once, the open nature of Rust allows for an entirely different scale of collaboration. With so many streamers engaging with one another at once, it is no surprise that Rust was able to surpass Just Chatting for the week and generate nearly 60M hours watched.
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