Spanish Streamer TheGrefg Obliterates All-Time Twitch Viewership Record

For years now, Twitch’s record for most concurrent viewers on a single streamer’s channel has been hotly contested, with streamers topping each other in slow-building increments. Today, however, Spanish streamer TheGrefg made everybody else look like they’d been wrestling for discarded peanut shells. As of writing, he topped out at nearly 2.5 million — a new all-time record that beats not just individual channels, but entire games.

Today, TheGrefg, a popular Spanish streamer, revealed his official Fortnite skin, which brought so many viewers to his channel that he managed to break the record for most concurrent viewers on an individual’s stream — a record that, according to some measures, he previously held, having managed to pull 660,000 concurrent viewers to his Fortnite Galactus event stream in December. Previous holders of this record include household names like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins.

But TheGrefg didn’t stop there. Time and time again, Twitch has proven that the most fertile soil for hype is … hype. As word got out about TheGrefg’s accomplishment, more and more viewers piled into his channel. His viewer count skyrocketed, first past 1 million concurrent viewers, then 2 million, all the way up to well over 2.4 million.

Previously, Fortnite held the record for most viewers across Twitch, pulling 2.3 million concurrent viewers to its season-ending “Device” event in June of last year. But these viewers were spread across numerous channels, and in-game space to experience the event was limited, which forced many to watch it via their favourite streamers. During a stream that started as an announcement of his Fortnite skin, TheGrefg singlehandedly beat Fortnite.

This might seem like it came out of nowhere, but it really didn’t. Over the past couple years, international streamers have grown in popularity, with Spanish streamers snagging an especially large piece of the pie. If you check Twitch’s most popular games and categories — Fortnite, Minecraft, Rust, Just Chatting, etc — it’s not uncommon to see not just the top most-viewed slot occupied by an international stream, but the top handful of slots.