Newzoo: Fans watched 81.8m hours of the Fortnite World Cup across Twitch, YouTube

The first-ever Fortnite World Cup last month was a massive undertaking, bringing together a number of popular and rising streamers and esports players to try for a piece of a $30 million prize pool.

And the spectacle itself, alongside the online presences of those streamers and esports personalities, brought in viewership spikes across Twitch and YouTube both for official channels and for individuals participating. Epic already announced the milestone of a peak 2.3 million concurrent viewers, the highest viewership for any esports event outside of China.

According to Newzoo, the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers brought in over 700,000 hours of viewership per week on official Twitch and YouTube channels, with Twitch bringing in 65% of that viewership.

However, the finals themselves saw higher viewership on the official YouTube channel, with 5.6 million total hours watched compared to Twitch's 4.5 million.

Individually a number of major streamers brought in copious hours viewed, including Ninja, whose then-still-instated Twitch channel saw 3 million live hours during the first two qualifying events -- more than both Fortnite's official Twitch channel and its official YouTube channel combined (1.8 million). Meanwhile, Tfue saw 2.3 million hours of live viewership during the week 7 qualifiers -- a competition record.

Finally, other unofficial channels not belonging to top streamers are estimated to have brought in a total of 12.1 million hours across the entire event. Altogether, the Fortnite World Cup saw 81.8 million total hours of live viewership, with official channels and top streamers accounting for 85% of that.