Tyler “Ninja” Blevins (33) was the biggest streamer on Twitch in 2017 and 2018 until he left the platform for Mixer and had a big payday. At that time, the blue-haired shooter player was ubiquitous thanks to the online shooter Fortnite . One thing he would do differently today: He would sell even more expensive products for even more money.
How big was Ninja back then? It’s hard to imagine in hindsight, as Twitch was much smaller than it is today, but Ninja was an even bigger star than the biggest streamer in 2023, Kai Cenat:
- Ninja averaged 77,719 viewers in 2018 when he was live – and with 3,013 hours, he was practically always live. He later said, he did not live in 2018, was a slave to the stream. The biggest streamer in 2023 on Twitch was Kai Cenat with an average of 61,933 viewers – but he was only online for 1,859 hours.
- Ninja made a whopping 11.9 million new followers in 2018. Kai Cenat reached about 5 million in 2023.
- The “cultural impact” is harder to measure. Ninja was everywhere in 2018: on talk shows, at sports events, on magazine covers, in streams with Drake. He took gaming and Twitch to a new level.
Ninja wishes he had made much more money, wanted to be even more commercial
What does he regret? It is this very ubiquity that Ninja regrets today. He says in hindsight he should have been more selective about what he made all his money with. He says in a podcast: (via YouTube)
We were at Target. We had a Ninja Nerf gun […]. We had 100 different Ninja shirts coming out. At some point, it became so much that it ended up on Fiverr. Is there anything wrong with Fiverr? No. But it doesn’t look good when you see a Ninja shirt for $1.
Ninja was a year too late with his shoe – by then he had already lost his fame
Ultimately, his merchandise was no longer special. If a shirt is being sold for $1, the man behind it cannot be the “David Beckham” of gaming.
If he could turn back time today, he would have been more selective about what merchandise to release during the Fortnite hype.
As he explains: His wife Jesse and he already knew back then how well shoes, that are introduced spontaneously, sold, and what kind of hype such a “shoe drop” creates. That opportunity was missed. Because his first “shoe”, a sneaker from adidas, could only be purchased starting December 31, 2019 – by then, Ninja had already traded all his hype for US dollars from Microsoft.
This is how he would do it differently today: He envies Nadeshot and his e-sport clan 100 Thieves, known for their clothing brand.
That is high-end stuff, of course expensive, but the shirts last forever.
Ultimately, they would have liked to make more drops, sales actions as events, but overall he is satisfied:
Our goal was to be everywhere. We had merch everywhere. We had plush toys and toys.
Ninja had his shoe, just too late:
Ninja wishes he had made more money from kids with his name
Why is that bold? Ninja made a huge fortune back then because everything played into his hands, and Epic alone ensured that he was showered with “free Twitch subscriptions that pay him” and money through the creators code. Even when his hype ended, he was kissed by luck and made a deal with Microsoft that paid him much more money than he ultimately had to work for.
Ninja is said to have earned ten million US dollars with Fortnite alone in 2018.
His regret is essentially not having pushed more stuff on people, where you don’t pay for the product, but for the influencer’s name. Exactly such scamming allegations were also made against the products from 100 Thieves, which Ninja now finds so great.
Ninja did eventually bring out the shoe – just not while he was still in the hype.
Because he ultimately traded his “hype” for even more money from Microsoft than he did when he signed with Mixer. It would be nice if Ninja, six years later, would say something like “I regret not doing more for gaming” or “I wish I had a more positive influence on the hundreds of thousands of kids who watched me back then.”
But the regret seems to be: I would have liked to earn even more millions $, even though I was already being showered with money from all sides.
That is a thoroughly selfish perspective. But that’s Ninja – he has always complained that he got his own Fortnite skin too late and that there could have been more money.
What should he actually regret? Well, instead of “I wish I had earned more money and extracted more money from kids with more expensive products”, there is a clear candidate for what Ninja should have left alone back then: “I don’t see enough movement”: Fortnite: Ninja challenges for 1 million to dance, fails brutally
