It feels like YouTuber IShowSpeed has been creating content for ages, he’s been a prominent figure online for a number of years now with plenty of highs and lows to show for it, but he’s actually a lot younger than you’d expect.
Born Darren Jason Watkins Jr, the online gamer started his YouTube channel back in 2016, although he didn’t start making game related content until around December 2017. He started out streaming games such as NBA 2K, Fortnite, and Roblox, although didn’t start seeing major success until 2021. In that year alone, his channel grew rapidly; he hit 100,000 in April, and then two months later hit 1 million. As of right now, IShowSpeed sits at 22.5 million subscribers on his channel.
That’s quite an impressive number, on top of that the streamer has lots of other achievements you could list, including winning a Streamy Award two years in a role. It would normally take years and plenty of experience for somebody to grow that much and do that much so logically you’d maybe expect the Speed to be in his mid 20s or something.
How old is IShowSpeed actually?
Darren has got to be one of the youngest individuals with such a high following, being only 18 years of age. During the period in which his channel was growing exponentially (2021-2022) he was still technically a child! His huge following is made even more impressive when you consider how young he is and how much more potential he has to grow.
At the time of writing it’s actually not too far off from his birthday, with the YouTuber set to turn 19 in three days. Darren was born on January 21st 2005, not a whole lot is actually known about his personal life but we do know he’s started making content on the internet almost as soon as he could. He would have only been 11 years old when he joined YouTube in 2016, and about 12 years old when he started streaming.
Today, His content has stayed largely consistent with how he started. He continues to stream games regularly on YouTube and has even been unbanned on Twitch, which is a pretty big deal considering how often other creators get banned on that platform.
But he’s done a lot more than just streaming, Speed has broadened his horizons somewhat, trying his hand at other things like making music and even appearing in music videos. Who knows what the future holds for him now.