Despite the recent rise of Spanish and Portuguese on Twitch, English-speaking streamers remain the most prevalent language group on the platform. To keep track of the dynamics within the group, Streams Charts continues to provide the quarterly breakdown of the Top 100 English-speaking Twitch content creators.
As such, this article reviews the viewership results of English-speaking streamers during the fourth quarter of 2021 (October-December). This includes the chart of top creators, country distribution within the group, as well as the most popular categories among its viewers and its audience overlap.
Note: Studio and gaming community channels have been excluded from these statistics.
Based on the statistics from previous quarters, there’s been a declining trend in viewership of the English-speaking streamers present in the second half of 2021. While the decrease in Q3 2021 was as much as 20%, it slowed down almost by half in Q4.
The Top 100 English-speaking Twitch streamers generated 629.9M Hours Watched, which makes 11.45% of total Hours Watched (5.5BN) accumulated on the platform and 23.94% of total HW (602.7M) generated by all English-speaking Twitch streamers in Q4 2021.
Compared to viewership results of Q3 2021, the number of Hours Watched generated by the Top 100 English-speaking streamers decreased by 11.04%.
The country distribution shows the United States as the most represented country among the Top 100 English-speaking streamers, with 64 out of the 100 creators being American.
Canada is next with 13 representatives, followed by Sweden (6 streamers), the United Kingdom (6 streamers) and Australia (4 streamers). The Top 100 in Q4 also included one representative from each of the following countries: New Zealand, Poland, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Malta and the United Arab Emirates.
Accordingly, the largest contribution of Hours Watched was made by streamers from the United States — 396.9M Hours Watched, which is 63% of the total HW generated by the Top 100.
Canada is second with 125M HW (17.5%), followed by Sweden with 35.2M HW (5.6%), the United Kingdom with 24.2M HW (3.9%) and Australia with 122.8M HW (3.6%).
The most popular English-speaking streamers on Twitch in Q4 2021
Although the placing has rearranged since Q3, seven names have persisted in the Top 10 English-speaking Twitch streamers chart in Q4 2021.
The first place is expectedly occupied by Canadian Felix “xQcOW” Lengyel, who’s been dominating Twitch in recent two years. Not only he became the leader of English-speaking creators in all quarters of 2021, but he was also the most-watched Twitch streamers in 2021.
In Q4 2021, his viewers spent 60.9M hours watching his streams, which is 9.67% of the total Hours Watched generated by the Top 100. Compared to Q3, xQcOW’s Hours Watched grew by 24.6%. Note that xQc’s HW count is 3 times higher than the amount of HW generated by the second-placed Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek.
Conversely, Shroud’s viewership went down a little compared to the previous quarter, when he placed as the sixth most-watched English-speaking Twitch streamer. In Q4, he garnered 19.9M Hours Watched (3.17% of the total HW generated by the Top 100), showing a 3.9% drop in viewership compared to Q3. That said, Shroud saw overall a huge growth in 2021 (163%) thanks to focusing most of his airtime on VALORANT.
The third place is taken by Hasan "HasanAbi" Dogan, who also jumped to a higher position despite accumulating less HW than in the previous quarter. With 16.4M Hours Watched (2.61% of the total HW by the Top 100), his viewership decreased by 22.3%.
The rest of the streamers who earned a spot in the Top 10 English-speaking Twitch creators are loltyler1, TrainwrecksTV, Summit1g, NICKMERCS, Castro_1021, Mizkif and Pestily, with the last three being newcomers to the chart.
Most of the streamers in the Top 10 are American except Canadians xQcOW and Shroud, as well as Pestily, who’s from Australia. Pestily reached the highest peak among the Top 10 in Q4 — 246K Peak Viewers.
The most popular female English-speaking Twitch streamers in Q4 2021
Just like in previous quarters, only a handful of female streamers got into the Top 100 and it’s mostly the same names as in Q3 except for one — Kim “kkatamina” Miyoung.
The 26-year-old Korean began her streaming career in the spring of 2020 by playing Minecraft and quickly started gaining traction due to her association with Offline TV. In November 2021, Kkatamina hosted a Twitch subathon which turned out to be record-breaking among female streamers on Twitch. In Q4 2021, she amassed 5M Hours Watched and placed as the second most watched female English-speaking Twitch streamer.
The leader among girls is for the third consecutive quarter Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa from the US, who generated 9.8M Hours Watched. That’s 1.57% of the total HW generated by the Top 100 and 18.4% less than her HW count in Q3. Amouranth spent over 1K hours broadcasting, mostly in categories ASMR and Just Chatting. She has also become the most popular female streamer on the platform in 2021.
Pokimane was third with 4.5M Hours Watched, followed by kyeade and 39daph.
Most popular categories
In Q4 2021, the audience of the Top 100 English-speaking Twitch creators enjoyed watching mostly broadcasts in Just Chatting category, generating 97.3M Hours Watched, which is 15.45% of the total HW by the Top 100.
The Top 10 categories in Q4 also included GTA V (68M HW), Apex Legends (44.3M HW), VALORANT (38.9M HW), Escape From Tarkov (32M HW), League of Legends (28.9M HW), Slots (28M HW), CoD: Warzone (26.8M HW), New World (21.4M HW) and FIFA 22 (16.7M HW).
When it comes to audience overlap among the Top 5 English-speaking streamers, the biggest intersection in Q4 2021 was between xQc’s, shroud’s, HasanAbi’s and Trainwreckstv’s viewers.
While only a small portion of xQc’s audience overlapped with other streamers (37.53% of xQc’s audience watched shroud, 15.83% watched HasanAbi, 19.64% watched loltyler1), more than half of Trainwreckstv’s (60.15%) and HasanAbi’s (54.56%) viewers also spectated xQc’s broadcasts.
As evidenced, there were minimal meta changes within the English-speaking group in Q4 2021 compared to previous quarters. Although the statistics of the final quarter of 2021 showed a decline in viewership of the Top 100 English-speaking Twitch streamers, the 11% drop implies natural fluctuation rather than a significant change in meta. If you’d like to find out more about Twitch viewership dynamics, check out our Twitch 2021 viewership analysis.
Header Image: Gamerant
