With the conclusion of the second quarter of 2021, it’s again time to take a look at who has been dominating Twitch in recent months. Specifically, who were the top English-speaking Twitch content creators — the most prevalent language group on the platform.
For this purpose, Streams Charts sorted the top 100 English-speaking Twitch streamers in Q2 2021 (May - June) by Hours Watched (hours that viewers spent watching streamers' broadcasts) and analyzed the results to see what are the current trends on the most popular live streaming platform. Studio and gaming community channels were excluded from these statistics.
During Q2 2021, the analysed group generated 883.7M Hours Watched, which makes 13.71% of total Hours Watched on the platform in Q2 (6.44BN HW) and 29.92% of total HW generated by all English-speaking streamers on the platform (2.95BN HW).
Compared to Q1 2021, the number of Hours Watched generated by the top 100 English-speaking streamers in Q2 increased by 4.58%, while their total Air Time (55.8K hours) increased only by 1.75%.
The distribution of countries within the group corresponds with the fact that Twitch is popular especially in the west. Out of 100 creators, 65 were from the United States, 9 from Canada, 8 from the United Kingdom, 7 from Sweden and 2 from Malta. The rest was from the countries with exactly one representative in the chart: New Zealand, Australia, Slovenia, Mexico, Brunei, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Poland and Spain.
Accordingly, the largest contribution of Hours Watched was made by streamers from the United States — 579.3M Hours Watched, which is 65.6% of the total HW generated by the top 100.
Canada is second with 154.7M HW (17.5%), followed by the United Kingdom with 60.1M HW (6.8%), Sweden with 41.6M HW (4.7%) and New Zealand with 10.9M HW (1.2%).
As for gender distribution — the majority of content creators within the analysed group of streamers were male, which reflected in the number of Hours Watched brought in by male streamers — 851.1M HW (96.3%). Compared to Q1, that’s a 4.21% growth in viewership.
Similarly to the results of the previous quarter, only six female creators got into the chart, generating a total of 32.6M Hours Watched (3.7%). Nevertheless, girls are showing notable growth in HW — 15.23% as opposed to Q1. Note that the Air Time of female streamers decreased by 12.95% in Q2. Given the fact that the number of female creators in the top 100 hasn’t changed, the growth in HW comes as even more significant, as girls were, in fact, streaming less.
To get a better perspective on who these streamers are, let’s take a look at the top 10 English-speaking streamers. This chart has barely changed compared to Q1 2021, with 9 names persisting in the top 10 and the first two spots remaining unchanged.
The first place is occupied by Canadian Felix “xQcOW” Lengyel, who is also the most-watched broadcaster on Twitch. In Q2 2021, his viewers spent 90.5M hours watching his streams, which is 10.25% of the total Hours Watched generated by the top 100. Compared to Q1, xQcOW’s Hours Watched grew by 21.46%.
American Jared “summit1g” Lazar is second with 30.9M Hours Watched — one third of xQcOW’s mark. summit1g’s contribution makes up to 3.5% of total HW by the top 100 and his HW growth went up by 8.25% over Q2 2021. The third place is taken by RanbooLive, who jumped from seventh place since the previous quarter. With 29.2M Hours Watched, he improved by 30.56%.
The rest of the streamers who earned a spot in the top 10 of most-watched English-speaking Twitch creators are NICKMERCS, loltyler1, shroud, HasanAbi, ludwig, Sykkuno and AdinRoss — the only name that didn’t appear in the chart in Q1 2021. AdinRoss showed the biggest viewership growth among the top 10 — 70% increase in HW. All of the streamers in the top 10 are American except xQcOW and shroud, who represent Canada.
Because none of the six female streamers got into the top 10, let’s take a look at how the whole female group performed in terms of viewership. The current top female Twitch streamer and the leader of female English-speaking Twitch creators in Q2 2021 is Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa from the US, who generated 12.8M Hours Watched, showing a 216.7% growth since April. It’s worth mentioning that Amouranth spent over 1K hours broadcasting, which is more than double the Air Time that any of the remaining five female streamers reached.
In regards to top Air Time among the 100, Amouranth was third, following Timmac who streamed over 1K hours in Q2, and the first ClassyBeef with 1.4K hours of Air Time.
The second-best performing female streamer was Imane “pokimane” Anys — the Canadian creator that was the leading Twitch female creator for a long time, including Q1 2021, until she’s been overtaken by Amouranth. Pokimane’s broadcasts generated 5.2M Hours Watched in Q2 2021, which is 23.88% less than in Q1.
Indiefoxx was third with 4M Hours Watched, followed by CaptainPuffy, fuslie and 39daph.
Similarly to the previous quarter, the most popular category among the top 100 English-speaking Twitch creators in Q2 was Grand Theft Auto V. Although only 29 of them broadcasted in this category, their viewers spent over 199.6M hours watching their GTA V streams (22.59% of the total Hours Watched among the 100).
Just Chatting was streamed by the highest number of creators — 82 people from the top 100 streamed in this category at least once between April and June. It was also the second most-watched category, generating 118.8M Hours Watched (13.45% of the total HW).
The top five also included Call of Duty: Warzone (93.9M Hours Watched), Minecraft (67M HW) and League of Legends (49.8M HW).
Looking at the gender split of categories by HW, there’s an obvious difference in preferences of male and female creators’ audiences. While GTA V dominated among male streamers’ spectators — 198.7M Hours Watched (23.35% of the total number of HW for male streamers), it hasn’t even appeared in the top categories preferred by viewers of female streamers.
Just Chatting was the top category for female streamers’ audiences — 11.4M Hours Watched (35.03%) and second for male streamers — 107.4M Hours Watched (12.63%).
Sorted by Air Time, GTA V (11.8K hours), Call of Duty: Warzone (6.1K hours) and Slots (4.4K hours) were the most-streamed categories by male streamers, while female creators preferred to broadcast mostly Just Chatting (990.1K hours), Minecraft (470.4K hours) and Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches (277.8K hours)
Notice that the majority of broadcasts by English-speaking female creators is IRL content, while male creators prefer to stream mostly games. The only two gaming titles in the top 5 categories streamed by women are Minecraft and VALORANT.
Our final chart analyses the audience overlap among the top 10 English-speaking streamers in Q2 2021 — or what portion of xQcOW’s audience also watched other streamers in the group. As we can see, shroud (35.55%), ludwig (28.7%) and summit1g (27%) have the highest percentages of audience overlap.
When it comes to Peak Viewers, nobody managed to overcome tommyinnit’s record of 650K PV from Q1 2021. The biggest peak in Q2 was achieved by NICKMERCS, who reached 371K concurrent spectators during the Call of Duty: Warzone’s The Destruction of Verdansk event.
As demonstrated, the growing viewership trend persists among the top 100 English-speaking Twitch streamers, although their overall growth is rather slow when compared to the beginning of 2021, without any significant quarterly changes in analysed metrics. If you want to find out more about the current Twitch meta, check out our analysis of Twitch viewership trends in Q2 2021.
Streams Charts is happy to accommodate a large variety of individual requests feel free to contact us at [email protected]
Header image: Dexerto
