The 2025 Royal Rumble was a professional wrestling event from WWE. Taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana, the event aired both on livestreaming platforms, pay-per-view, and on Netflix outside the US. The event featured streamers and content creators both attending and directly participating, and WWE has already announced it was one of their most successful events ever. Streams Charts presents a look at the livestreaming viewership statistics for the recent wrestling phenomenon.
North American livestreaming stars Darren “IShowSpeed” Watkins Jr. and Kai Cenat were both in attendance at the event, hosting IRL broadcasts on their channels. Speed even took it one step further, entering the ring himself and putting on a show for fans. A clip of Speed’s time in the ring posted to X became the WWE’s most-viewed Royal Rumble social post of all time at over 300,000,000 views in 24 hours, according to the WWE.
WE NEVER SAW IT COMING! ?@ishowspeedsui just entered the Men's #RoyalRumble Match and got DESTROYED by @bronbreakkerwwe! pic.twitter.com/ZeHyYegDiH
— WWE (@WWE) February 2, 2025
The WWE’s mega-viral post of IShowSpeed’s time in the Royal Rumble ring
Integrating streamers into the show coincided with the most successful Royal Rumble ever. In the same report, the WWE elaborate that viewership numbers are up following the expansion to Netflix globally, and that merchandise, sponsorships, and tickets all enjoyed significant boosts in profit for the 2025 iteration. The livestreaming statistics paint a similar story, that 2025 was one of the most successful years yet for the WWE.
In total, this year’s Royal Rumble received over 1.28M Hours Watched. This includes pre-event build-ups and post-event interviews and broadcasts. It is important to note that these viewership statistics are not representative of event broadcasts. These livestreams may feature live streamer reactions, but not coverage of the main event.
Viewership and coverage of the WWE’s Royal Rumble expanded significantly in 2025, but Peak Viewers especially noted an uptick of over 240%. Famed streamers Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed dominated peak viewership for the event, and integrating these two helped expose the event to a wider young, digital audience.
2025 also hosted more extensive pre-show streams, with broadcasts beginning at 4 PM Eastern Time, compared to 7 PM in the previous year. These extra hours of broadcasting helped the event to generate a much larger total watch time, and break the 1,000,000 HW barrier.
Breaking down event watch time by country, most of the viewership came from the United States of America. The host country came out ahead of South Korea, and some minor European and North American audiences.
2024 actually hosted a more diverse spread of viewership from across the globe, albeit a lower total amount. Last year, South Korea and the United Kingdom were more crucial part of the event’s overall viewership, but North American viewership exploded in size this year thanks to Speed and Kai Cenat. Of these minor audiences, Spanish-speaking viewership grew in size for 2025, and viewership from the UK has dipped.
Of course, the most-watched channels of the event included Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed. Their respective broadcasts of the event, although short, generated high viewership. Speed was only live for less than an hour, and KaiCenat was live for a similar amount of time, but they both managed to reach over 160,000 concurrent viewers. The official WWE YouTube account was also highly-watched, thanks to a buildup broadcast to the main event.
Outside of these top channels, the WWE’s SOOP Korea (ex-AfreecaTV) account, WWE공식1, was highly-watched by Korean-speaking wrestling fans. Other co-streams across YouTube and Twitch received sizeable viewership, but could not stand close to the top broadcasters.
Compared to last year, the SOOP Korea broadcast was one of the most popular streams of the year. This is not because the event has lost viewers in this region, but rather because co-streaming on YouTube continues to find more and more viewers.
Analysing Twitch Chat mentions statistics offers us a different view of event’s popularity in the online sphere. Rather than relying on pure viewership numbers, we can also collate how many Twitch viewers discussed or mentioned the Royal Rumble by name in the month leading up to it. In total, more than 10.3K Users mentioned the Rumble on Twitch, about just 300 fewer than last year. Comparing this year’s data to last, the Royal Rumble enjoyed a similar level of exposure on Twitch.
However, while the amount of mentions remained similar, the number of total channels where users mentioned the event dropped by over 10%. While the event was discussed a similar amount, this discussion was slightly more concentrated and diluted across fewer total channels. Again, this could be an effect from massive outlier Kai Cenat on Twitch.
In summary, the Royal Rumble 2025 was a success in livestreaming just as it was on Netflix, and in-person. The inclusion of industry-leading North American streamers Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed helped boost the event’s total viewership and exposure from the massive audiences of these creators. 2025 also started for the WWE with a large increase of channels covering their events through co-streams on various livestreaming platforms, something they could use to their advantage for future events.
