The streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins (Fortnite) believes that both Twitch and YouTube still have major problems with him and are therefore secretly suppressing his reach.
What does he mean by that? In a Twitch stream at the end of January 2025, the streamer says:
I definitely feel that Twitch is still angry with me. Twitch is mad at me because of Mixer and YouTube is mad because I rejected their offer three times. I think I’m shadowbanned on both platforms.
I mean: Let’s not forget that Twitch put Russian p*rn on my stream.
Ninja left Twitch in 2019 and has never been as successful since
What does he mean by that? Ninja was by far the biggest streamer on Twitch in 2017 and 2018. His channel grew at a crazy pace that no one has reached since.
Even today, 7 years later, Ninja has the largest channel on the platform with 19.2 million followers. No one is even close to that. At his peak in 2018, he had an average of 77,000 viewers.
But in August 2019, Ninja switched to Microsoft’s competing platform Mixer for a lot of money.
Since many people continued to visit his channel on Twitch, but there was nothing to find there, Twitch used the channel to promote other streams.
But someone hacked the channel and used the enormous popularity of Ninja’s channel on Twitch to show adult films there. Twitch later apologized to Ninja for that.
Ninja allegedly rejected an exclusive deal from YouTube 3 times
And what’s up with YouTube? Ninja suggests that YouTube also tried to poach him with exclusive deals. Nothing is known about that.
But for a while, YouTube actually lured big streamers from Ninja’s environment to the platform with exclusive deals. But Ninja did not tie himself to any platform anymore, but wanted to be a trendsetter and stream simultaneously on multiple platforms.
In retrospect, he probably gambled on that: because this simultaneous streaming
never really worked for him.
Is he really shadowbanned? That sounds like quite a conspiracy theory. Ninja now has an average of 7,300 viewers on Twitch – that’s nowhere near as much as before, but still a decent reach. The reach has consistently decreased in recent years because Ninja has continuously lost relevance and also streams much less than before.
There’s a clear pattern on YouTube as well.
- Ninja’s regular content, when he plays Marvel Rivals, simply interests only a few people anymore
- When he plays Fortnite or games with people from the past, like TimTheTatman, he immediately has 10 times more viewers
Ninja traded his relevance for millions of US dollars when he switched to Mixer, and he no longer has the reach he had at his peak.
The idea that the platforms are somehow “holding him down” sounds a bit absurd. Ninja is now 22 years old: in 2017 and 2018 he had a lot of young viewers on Fortnite. They must have looked for other streamers when he switched to Mixer in 2019. The currently most popular streamer in Fortnite is Clix, who is 13 years younger than Ninja, and Clix also complains: Twitch streamer says he gets no respect for saving Fortnite alone
