PewDiePie’s ‘Fortnite’ Stream Brought in Over 300,000 Live Viewers

Famous YouTuber PewDiePie streamed Fortnite to bring in more subscribers to aid in his battle against T-Series, and in doing so, he had over 300,000 live viewers watching him learn the game.

PewDiePie himself said the stream was an attempt to get more subscribers on YouTube with the title of his stream above reading “Playing Fortnite to stop Tseries (Im desperate).” Stat-tracking site Social Blade showed that PewDiePie gained 277,106 subscribers on Sunday, the same day he streamed Fortnite, so something about the stream must’ve worked.

What’s even more impressive about PewDiePie’s stream is that he had at one point more viewers watching his YouTube gameplay than all of the Fortnite viewers combined who were watching other streamers on Twitch. Multiple people took notice of it and shared screenshots showing the side-by-side comparisons of PewDiePie’s YouTube stream compared to the Fortnite category on Twitch. His live viewer count grew from around 100,000 to cross over the 300,000 mark, but even before the reached that number, he’d already amassed more live viewers than those who were watching Fortnite on Twitch.

The video was and still is at the time of publication the No. 1 video that’s trending on YouTube Gaming, so that alone undoubtedly brought in more viewers who might only have a cursory knowledge of Fortnite, PewDiePie, or both. PewDiePie also has over 80 million subscribers, so even though the live viewer number was just a fraction of his audience, it was still more than enough to eclipse the total number of viewers on Twitch.

Playing Fortnite and fumbling around with the controls to the amusement of his viewers is just the latest of many efforts the streamer’s made to stay above T-Series, the Indian YouTube channel which isn’t far behind him in terms of subscribers. There are all sorts of live tracking services that have been set up to watch the subscriber counts and are constantly updating to show which channel has more, but T-Series has (so far) never beaten PewDiePie.

A “Subscribe to PewDiePie” campaign has been pushed all around YouTube, Twitch, and gaming culture by the streamer’s followers. Some of the past efforts from his followers include going so far as to hijack online games and remote printers to spread the word.