Number One on YouTube Gaming: Inside Ilyas El Maliki’s Q1 2023 Record

In April 2023, the analytics firm Streams Charts published its ranking of the most popular YouTube Gaming streamers for the first quarter of the year. At the top was not IShowSpeed, TimTheTatman or Dr Disrespect, but a Moroccan streamer broadcasting in Darija from El Jadida: Ilyas El Maliki.

The ranking

Streams Charts ranks streamers by hours watched: the total time viewers spent watching their live broadcasts. Between January and March 2023, Ilyas spent 258 hours on air and collected more than 8.9 million hours watched, with an average of 34.7K viewers.

• 1. Ilyas El Maliki: 8.9 million hours watched.
• 2. IShowSpeed: about 8.57 million hours watched.
• 3. TimTheTatman: about 7.5 million hours watched.
• 9. Dr Disrespect: about 6.25 million hours watched.

Brazil’s Nobru (about 7.1 million) and Japan’s Kuzuha (about 6.9 million) also made the top ten. The gap at the top was narrow: Ilyas finished roughly 330,000 hours ahead of IShowSpeed, about 4%.

How the numbers add up

IShowSpeed actually drew more people at any given moment: Streams Charts gives him 46.4K average viewers, against 34.7K for Ilyas. What made the difference was time on air. Dividing each streamer’s hours watched by his average viewers gives his approximate airtime: about 185 hours for IShowSpeed, against 258 for Ilyas. Ilyas simply streamed more, and his audience followed him for all of it.

The comparison is even more striking next to subscriber counts. At the time, Ilyas had about 730,000 YouTube subscribers; IShowSpeed had 16.5 million. On average, Ilyas had live viewers equal to almost 5% of his subscribers at every moment of his streams. For IShowSpeed, the same ratio was under 0.3%. A smaller channel with an unusually loyal audience topped the chart.

(These two calculations are ours, made from the figures Streams Charts and Bladi published. Those figures are rounded, so the airtime estimates are approximate.)

January did most of the work

The climb started fast. In its January 2023 report, which ranked every YouTube Gaming channel including esports broadcasters, Streams Charts put Ilyas in sixth place with 4.8 million hours watched in that month alone. That single month accounts for more than half of his total for the quarter.

What he was streaming

According to Streams Charts and SVG, most of his airtime went to FIFA 23, alongside GTA V, reactions to YouTube and TikTok videos, conversations with strangers on Azar and Omegle, and TikTok lives he joined while streaming. H24info describes him reacting to viral videos and to national and international news with a humorous, teasing tone. Football ran through all of it: SVG noted his jerseys on stream and his thumbnails of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the tournament where Morocco reached the semi-finals.

All of it happened in Darija, Moroccan Arabic, a dialect that rarely tops global charts.

The reaction

The ranking travelled fast. In Morocco, H24info headlined that “the world champion of YouTube streams is Moroccan”, and Bladi.net covered the 8.9 million hours. In the United States, the gaming site SVG published a profile titled “Meet Ilyas Elmaliki, YouTube’s Biggest Gamer Of 2023 So Far”.

What came next

A few months later, in July 2023, Ilyas signed with Kick, the platform where he streams today. That story is told in From YouTube to Kick. For his whole career, see the Ilyas El Maliki biography.