Ninja doesn’t mind even though I’m slowly losing my charm

Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevin was once the most popular streamer, not just on Twitch but anywhere. However, over the past 12 months, his viewership has been dropping dramatically. So is this really alarming for Ninja? Let’s take a look at the data to understand better.

At its peak on Twitch, mid-2018, Ninja broke the record for most subscribers with over 250,000. This record was later broken, but at the time, it was a huge number – no one had hit 100,000 before that.

He also broke the record for the most continuous viewership as an independent streamer, when he played games with Drake and Travis Scott. Ninja continued to grow and become the most followed streamer on Twitch, but things stalled when he moved to Mixer.

Microsoft’s (now closed) Mixer platform pays a lot of money to have Ninja and shroud stream here. At the time, they were the two biggest names on Twitch. When the platform closed, Ninja took a break from streaming for about a month and tried streaming on YouTube before returning to Twitch. He quickly regained his position as the channel with the most followers – but Twitch and livestreaming in general at this point have changed.

Ninja’s stats on Twitch 2021

Over the past six months, Ninja averaged 12,672 viewers on the channel – down 49 percent from six months earlier. This is a huge drop, while Ninja still streamed for 893 hours – an increase of 139%. There are three main reasons for this.

Game selection

Ninja used to be a former professional Halo player and was more famous for playing PUBGG, but it was Fortnite that launched him to success.

He rarely plays Fortnite in 2021, only streaming a little in May. Instead, Ninja mostly streams Valorant and League of Legends. Despite being talented gamers, these two games have too many good players, as well as famous big streamers from them.

Streamer saturation

When Ninja boomed in 2018, he almost single-handedly made livestreaming as popular as it is today. As a result, thousands of streamers jumped on Twitch with YouTube in hopes of succeeding like him, making the livestream segment more competitive than ever.

Ninja is now in the ‘old’ group, with names like Summit1g, LIRIK, Sodapoppin and shroud. These are all streams with loyal fans, who watch their streams in almost every game. But veteran streamers are nothing new, so viewership is limited by these loyal fans.

Missing new games

One of the reasons beyond Ninja’s control is the lack of great new multiplayer games. Warzone and Valorant are the two most recent new names, but both are also over a year old.

If there’s a great new multiplayer game coming out, be it a battle royale or a shooter, then Ninja could be at the top of the charts when the game comes out. But with the current situation, Ninja is not in the ‘top’ of any game today and is just a big streamer playing many different games.

Why Ninja doesn’t mind

We could look at these numbers and assume that Ninja would be disappointed to have averaged less than 15,000 viewers. But in fact, he was very satisfied. Not because of the drop in numbers, but because his viewership is now almost exclusively loyal fans – the main group of fans that always follow whatever game he plays.

At its peak, in 2018 and 2019, Ninja was so popular, but with that, Tyler was always under scrutiny. Any opinions or comments Ninja makes are analyzed by fans, streamers and the media for a long time. Anything Tyler says, from stream snipe, stream with girls, sports or game, there will always be people criticizing him.

Now, Ninja feels more comfortable, can play any game he wants, no longer bother to be watched in all his actions and still reach a loyal viewership of over 10,000.

Although Ninja may not be the number one streamer anymore, he is in a position that nearly every streamer has to envy.

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