Tyler “Ninja” Blevins was easily one of the most popular stars to come from 2018. If you haven’t heard of Ninja, you may wanna move back to your underground cave. Ninja became the biggest and fastest streamer of all-time last year on Twitch. Becoming a top video game streamer may net you worldwide fame and money beyond your wildest dreams but it does come at a cost, your free time. Streaming has turned into a full-time job for most these large streamers. Many will easily play more than 40+ hours a week. A con to streaming though, if you’re away from your schedule too much, it can start costing you views, subscribers and ultimately money. That’s as true for small streamers as it is for the very biggest and while Ninja has been away a lot recently, including appearing in adverts for the Superbowl, that’s had a drastic effect on his subscriber numbers.
Ninja used to be on top of the Twitch world with subscribers. According to Twitchstats.net, he is now only the 12th most subscribed streamer with 26,908 subscribers at the time of this writing. That’s still an enormous amount, an estimated $130K a month from Twitch alone, but only a fraction of what his subscriber base used to be when he created the Twitch record of over 263K concurrent subscribers last year, only a short 10 months ago.
Those record numbers were inflated by a promotion with Twitch Prime, with the current number one star being Shroud with ‘only’ around 70,000 subscribers, but the drop is still startling. Ninja has built himself up to be a well-known star now. He’s getting tv commercials, different branding agreements and special appearances that are most likely helping Ninja make more than he ever has earned from streaming alone. But these stats show that even the most famous streamers can’t afford to be away from Twitch for long or they risk losing everything that they were originally famous for.
Another stat to look at though, Ninja may not be top 10 in subscribers anymore but he is still easily the most followed and watched streamer still. According to Twitchstats.net, Ninja has over 13 million followers. This doubles #2 in followers, which is Shroud with 5.7 million followers on Twitch.