During the past month, Twitch’s 
top Fortnite influencers, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Turner “Tfue” Tenney, have seen enhanced viewership figures on Twitch while they’ve streamed their qualification attempts for the upcoming World Cup.
However, this week, Blevins decided to take a different approach to qualifying. In an attempt to prioritize winning a bid during Sunday’s duo qualifiers, Blevins and his partner Malachi “Reverse2K” Greiner, decided to not stream. After watching video of their performance during Saturday’s portion of qualifying, Blevins announced via Twitter that he would not stream to see if they could compete more successfully.
After watching a lot of vods and our own gameplay @Reverse2k_ and I are gunna try to not stream duos this week and see how it goes. <3
— Ninja (@Ninja) May 19, 2019
As a result, Blevins, who posted 2M hours watched for the week, missed an entire day of streaming. To put it into perspective, during the previous duos qualification weekend, Blevins’ eight-hour Sunday stream averaged 75K concurrent viewers, peaking at 159K CCV with a total of 633K hours watched.
With Blevins focused solely on competing, Tenney’s stream thrived on Sunday as Twitch’s most-watched Fortnite streamer so far this year produced his best viewership of the year for a single session.
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By streaming his perspective of Sunday’s action, Tenney recorded 1.1M hours watched across eight hours of airtime with an average of 131K CCV, peaking at 256K CCV. The only influencer to best that max CCV so far this year was Blevins when he had 317K on January 19 during one of Fortnite’s in-game spectacles that regularly attract viewer influxes for top personalities.
That average viewership mark by Tenney surpassed his previous best for the year when he achieved an average of 114K CCV on Sunday, April 28 after he successfully qualified for the solo portion of the World Cup. Tenney’s next two highest average viewership streams came during the first Sunday of World Cup Qualifying, and the Sunday of duo qualifications on May 5.
With Tenney back in action after taking a week of solo qualifiers off, Fortnite’s main broadcast on Twitch saw a dip in viewership. After Blevins failed to earn a spot in the Sunday qualifiers last week, the Fortnite channel had its most-watched day of qualifications so far reaching 414K hours watched.
This weekend, the Fortnite channels’ Sunday viewership declined significantly to 211K hours watched while the game’s top influencers competed with Tenney streaming his point of view.
For Fortnite as a whole, viewership from the weekend, is comparable to the first weekend in May, when the previous duos qualifier for the World Cup took place. The weekend saw stronger viewership than the weekend of May 11-12 when Blevins saw an early exit from qualifications and Tenney did not participate.
It’s yet to be seen whether or not Blevins will continue the practice of not streaming during qualifiers, but if he chooses to do so, the total viewership of Fortnite could be affected. With Tenney having already qualified for the World Cup’s solo event, he doesn’t have a reason to participate in this weekend’s event. If Blevins competes but doesn’t stream his perspective, there could be a viewership void to be filled in the category of Fortnite esports.
