After a quick rise to fame in the streaming world in 2020, popular streamer Valkyrae is now the world's most watched female streamer by a significant margin. Although she originally began her career on Twitch, Valkyrae made the switch to YouTube last year and her monthly live view count skyrocketed from 330,000 to 11 million, making her the fastest-growing streamer in the world at the time. Valkyrae's popularity is due in part to her good timing, as she began streaming the popular social deduction game Among Us around the time it began to explode onto the gaming scene.
But Valkyrae hasn't solely relied on her Among Us success to keep her audience growing. She's also collaborated with other big streamers like Pokimane, Jacksepticeye, and Sykkuno in other games. She joined the Rust OfflineTV server in December 2020 and played for bit until the OfflineTV server split up and most of its members quit due to controversy in and out of the game. But since then her viewership has continued to climb. According to a recent report from streaming information database Stream Hatchet, she hit over 12 million hours watched in the first quarter of 2021.
The Stream Hatchet report also shows that Valkyrae's hours watched totals are nearly double that of her closest competitors. Pokimane is next on the list with 6.8 million hours watched. Though Pokimane primarily streams on Twitch, she also spends a lot of time uploading Q&A and Fortnite videos to her YouTube channel and runs an entirely separate ASMR channel as well. Valkyrae beat Pokimane to become the most-watched female streamer late last year, and she's apparently still surging ahead.
Although Valkyrae has achieved success on YouTube, she still has issues with streaming on the platform. She explained in a recent TrainwrecksTV podcast that she believes YouTube is "far behind" Twitch when it comes to streaming largely due to its lack of streamer culture. Twitch's streaming community has only grown since its beginning in 2011, and Valkyrae feels the platform has a stronger emote culture and more options for finding other streamers with an established directory and hosting. She's also not satisfied with YouTube's chat system, which is generally more restrictive than Twitch's.
Still, Valkyrae's brand continues to push forward. As the first female content creator to join the gaming organization 100 Thieves, she has her own apparel with the company and helps to promote them with her content. She also continues to stream Among Us and was recently given the opportunity to play Among Us with Jimmy Fallon, other popular streamers, and cast members from the hit TV show Stranger Things. It's hard tell how long Valkyrae will be able to hold such a large lead other streamers, but for now she is one of YouTube's biggest draws for gamers.
Source: Stream Hatchet