How do you engineer a record-breaking Twitch stream? Inviting a world-famous rapper onto your channel is generally a good way to start.
Tyler Blevins, known online as Ninja, delivered the most-viewed non-tournament Twitch stream of all time by playing Fortnite: Battle Royale alongside Aubrey Graham, better known as Drake.
The stream began around 1 AM ET on March 15 and lasted for close to an hour, as Ninja and Drake teamed up to run through a few rounds in the trendy multiplayer game. At its peak, the broadcast brought 635,000 concurrent viewers to Ninja’s channel, surpassing the previous non-tournament record by nearly 250,000. The overall viewership record on Twitch belongs to an e-sports broadcast that received 1.1 million viewers earlier this year.
The exact details of how the partnership came to be aren’t exactly clear, but Drake announced himself as a fan of Ninja when he followed the streamer on Instagram last week. Ninja’s excited reaction to that bit of social media activity made headlines
and produced a wonderful clip.For Ninja, the collaboration with Drake and the record-setting session are the latest steps in a remarkable rise to prominence. After spending years as a grinder in the e-sports scene, the streamer has become one of Twitch’s most popular broadcasters. He owes his success not just to his skill at Fortnite and his family-friendly delivery, but also to a deal that unlocks special content for Fortnite players who have Twitch Prime accounts. In search of those in-game perks, Fortnite fans have flocked to Twitch, and Ninja’s channel in particular.
Drake, meanwhile, has never seemed like a huge gamer, or at least not publicly, but he clearly has some interest in Twitch and its creative community. Already, requests for Drake-related emotes are rolling in. Perhaps this is a sign of streams to come for the Canadian superstar.
On September 23, YouTube held its annual Made On event in New York City. If you've tuned into previous…
At this year's VidSummit, running Sept. 29-Oct. 1 at the Irving Convention Center in Texas,…
Between September 21-23, the organization that oversees competitive fencing in the United States is bringing influencers…
The large language model (LLM) that introduced many consumers to the current era of AI…
Welcome to our rundown of the most-watched branded YouTube videos of the week. We're publishing…
As Donald Trump faces a media blockade, he's counting on YouTube to keep him on air. A…