How Twitch became a Spanish-language platform

One of the most interesting stories our data has surfaced over the past year is Twitch’s transformation from America’s premier destination for livestreaming to an overwhelmingly Spanish-language sports network. Which has happened at a pivotal moment for the platform.

Twitch has just come through the other side of a major C-suite shakeup. Large streamers are leaving the platform, and the ones that haven't are seeing their audiences shrink significantly. Late last year, the platform pulled out of Korea, one of its biggest markets. 

But amid all this chaos, Spanish-language live sporting events are thriving on the site, particularly soccer and boxing. 

Not only are the platform's streamers in Spain pulling in enormous numbers on a monthly basis, they're also rewriting livestreaming's relationship to the world of mainstream media and entertainment, using Twitch streams to organize physical events in sold-out stadiums.

Last month, once again, the most-viewed stream on Twitch was from a Spanish streamer. On average, English-language Twitch streams outnumber Spanish ones more than 5-to-1, but Spanish-language streams landed on our monthly list of the top Twitch streams 16 times last year, while English had the highest number of streams with 25 (French had the third most with four). Spanish streamers also make up the second-biggest chunk of streamers on Twitch with the most subscribers.

The big two of Spanish Twitch 

The de-facto kings of Spanish Twitch are David Cánovas Martínez, who goes by TheGrefg and has ~12M followers on the platform, and Ibai Llanos, known to his fans as Ibai, who has 15.6M followers.

Martínez found a following for his presentation style and personality rather than as a professional-caliber gamer. He started on YouTube streaming the “Call of Duty” games, but his popularity exploded when he became one of the first Spanish-language streamers to play “Fortnite” after the game was released in 2017. He became a prominent figure in the “Fortnite” community and set Twitch viewership records in 2021 when he became a playable character. 

He’s gone on to use his status to create events like the Esland Awards, which honor popular Spanish-language streamers. The 2024 Esland awards reached a peak of 408K simultaneous viewers, according to TwitchTracker, making it a more popular Twitch stream than the English-language (and much more expensive) Game Awards, which had a reported peak of 402K.

Martínez used to have the record for most-watched Twitch stream, with nearly 2.5M concurrent viewers, until Llanos breezed past him in 2022 with almost 3.4M. The two streamers now regularly compete for the site's most-watched streams.

Llanos had a similar trajectory to that of Martínez. He worked his way up the ranks as an announcer, going from amateur “League of Legends” games to calling the Spanish broadcasts for the game’s official world championships in 2015. Along the way he amassed a devoted following for his deep-voiced, boisterous announcing style. He also works across platforms — in 2021, after a TikTok of siblings trying to keep a balloon in the air went viral, Ibai bought the broadcast rights and held an event called the Balloon World Cup.

The same year, Llanos also started an annual boxing event called La Velada del Año, or The Evening of the Year. The 2023 event sold out a 60K-seat stadium in an hour and broke the all-time Twitch viewing record with ~3.5M simultaneous viewers, which had previously been held by Martínez for his “Fortnite” outfit reveal.

IRL sports are using Twitch to reach massive Spanish-speaking audiences

Martínez and Llanos are also founding members of Kings League, a real-world soccer league founded in 2022 aimed at a streaming audience. 

This doesn’t just mean broadcasting games directly on Twitch that are commentated by Llanos, but adding rules to conventional soccer inspired by video games and pro wrestling. Think XFL for soccer. Kings League matches are regularly among the most popular Twitch streams, and the first championship sold out crowd the 99K-seat Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona.

When these events sell out arenas, they aren’t just changing the scale of Twitch — they’re redefining its relationship to traditional media by breaking into the mainstream. Since 2020, Llanos has hosted a televised talk show; Martínez released a game show pilot on Twitch in 2023. Meanwhile, English-speaking internet figures like YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) and pro gamer Richard Tyler Blevins (Ninja) have struggled to cross over into the mainstream.

Spain has a unique advantage in digital media

So why are streamers from Spain doing so well on Twitch? 

The first piece of the puzzle is that creators based in Spain started on the platform very early. Martínez launched his channel in 2012 when he was still a teenager. As of 2021 he had the seventh-biggest YouTube channel in Spain. And he's been able to move that audience around the web as he's transitioned into livestreaming.

The other important detail here is that Spanish-language creators make content for audiences far beyond Spain. Livestreaming and esports are huge in Latin America, with an estimated audience of 55M people as of last year. But Latin American digital creators aren't able to monetize it as effectively as creators like Martínez and Llanos can in Spain. As Bloomberg reported last year, digital ad rates for creators in Latin America are some of the lowest in the world. Which means that, according to a 2023 report from Insider Intelligence, a creator in Mexico is making around 20% of what a creator in Spain with the same size audience would make.

All this puts Spanish streamers in a unique position. They have access to the European digital ad market and can broadcast to Spanish-speaking audiences all over the globe. There’s also the fact that Hispanic and Latino viewers are still fairly underserved by streaming platforms. A Los Angeles Times story in 2021 said there was a dearth of content for Spanish-speaking internet audiences. Twitch, it seems, is filling that vacuum.

The important question here is how this will shape Twitch's future. The company has lost its early lead in livestreaming to YouTube and is struggling to find its way forward in a hyper-competitive and always changing digital-video industry. Maybe they’ve just been focusing on the wrong audience.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.