For just the second time since the metric was created, Cristiano Ronaldo has been dethroned as the most talked about sports star on the planet.
To rub salt into the Portuguese star's wounds, he's been knocked off the top perch as the biggest athlete on social media by someone who sits and watches a TV all day.
26-year-old gamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins has come from nowhere to become sports' biggest social media star, according to the Hookit Engagement 100 rankings for April.
The star gamer, who has become the highest profile streamer on Amazon's Twitch platform, making his name on super-popular game "Fortnite".
Blevins has previously said he earns more than $US6 million ($8.6 million) per year, playing the game through paid subscribers to his Twitch streams.
According to Forbes, Blevins has 4 million Twitch subscribers, including 160,000 paid subscribers. He earns $3.50 for every new paid subscriber — as well as a small fortune in YouTube revenue and fan donations on Twitch.
"I think that I offer a combination of high-tier game play that they really can't get with a lot of other content creators," Blevins told CNBC recently.
"It's very difficult to be one of the very best at a video game.
"I'm very goofy; if you ever watched any of my streams or YouTube videos, I do impressions and stuff like that all the time and just crazy shenanigans. I think the combination of that [game skill and entertainment] is really fun to watch."
Apparently, it's a bloody hoot — he's just become the most popular sports star on social media.
Blevins was ranked No. 3 on Hookit's Engagement 100 in March — but jumped superstars LeBron James and Ronaldo in April to claim the top spot.
He becomes just the fourth star to earn the No. 1 rank, with Ronaldo only previously ousted from the top spot by Brazilian superstar Neymar and Colombian World Cup hero James Rodriguez since the metric was first run in April, 2014.
Philadelphia NBA star Ben Simmons was the only Aussie to make the top 100 in April, coming in at No. 95.
Blevins has been making more headlines than ever in recent months following his record-breaking Fortnite stream alongside Canadian rapper Drake — where they achieved the highest number of concurrent views in Twitch history, maxing out at 635,000 concurrent viewers.
In February he also set a record for the highest number of in-game kills playing on a Fortnite mode called Duos.
His online presence has exploded in the past 12 months.
In 2017, Blevins had a reasonable social following of 28,000 subscribers on YouTube — mostly on the back of his career as a professional Halo gamer.
He now has more than 6 million YouTube subscribers.
Twitch streamer and professional gamer Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins. Photo / Getty Images
WHAT EXACTLY IS FORTNITE?
The game is heavily influenced by Playerunknown's Battlegrounds - a Battle-Royale game which places 100 players on a remote island for a winner-takes-all showdown.
Fortnite has no single-player campaign and the online component ends as soon as you die — there are no second chances.
Players drop out of a flying purple bus and parachute down to an island below where they try to locate weapons and supplies in distinct regions that will be used to kill others in the game.
To ensure fast gameplay, Fortnite eventually forces players into a shrinking play zone - if you're outside of that area, your health begins to drain until you're dead.
Unlike Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite puts a large focus on crafting, which is made possible from the game's destructible environments.
Once you've collected enough resources to build something, you can begin assembling walls and ramps for protection, with the game also allowing players to create traps.
Available on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mac - and coming to iOS and Android - the free video game has attracted 45 million players worldwide since being released around six months ago.
In February, Fortnite achieved a record-breaking 3.4 million people playing at the same time, with the title also now the most-watched release on the world's largest video game-streaming platform, Twitch.
As mentioned earlier, Fortnite is free to download on almost every video game platform.
And with 45 million players worldwide, it might seem like the developer missed its chance to make a fortune from selling the title.
Although, it appears Epic Games is trying to get money from microtransactions - players pay $A12.71 for $1000 of the virtual currency used by the game.
Using the virtual currency players can purchase items for their character which are "cosmetic only and grant no competitive advantage".
Surprisingly, the people playing the game also have a chance to make money from Fortnite, with a player making at least $A445,000 a month from his Twitch subscriptions.
