Ninja passes 500 thousand subscribers on Mixer after leaving Twitch

Numbers first: 500 thousand subscribers in a few days, about 644 thousand followers and 3.8 million views. That was the scoreboard for streamer Richard Tyler Blevins, Ninja, on Mixer in early August 2019, right after swapping Twitch for Microsoft’s streaming platform. On August 1, he announced he would stream exclusively on Mixer.

In practice, this means the move was a real test of the strength of the Ninja name. He had more than 10 million followers on Twitch but, according to figures cited by the press at the time, fewer than 15 thousand paying subscribers there. On Mixer, there was an important detail for reading the data carefully: the platform offered a promotion that let people subscribe to his channel for free. Even so, the effect was immediate, and the Mixer app reached the top of the free apps on the iOS App Store after the first stream, made straight from the Lollapalooza festival in the United States.

The context helps gauge the bet. Ninja had become the face of Fortnite: in March 2018, he broke the record for concurrent viewers on a single-person stream, with 635 thousand people, playing with Drake, Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster. Mixer, for its part, was born as Beam in 2016, was bought by Microsoft in August that year and had been trying to compete with Twitch by signing big names, such as Ninja and Shroud.

What came next

Microsoft’s bet didn’t last. Claiming it couldn’t scale the operation, the company struck a partnership with Facebook Gaming and shut Mixer down on July 22, 2020, which freed Ninja from the exclusivity. On September 10, 2020, he announced a new multi-year exclusive deal with Twitch and returned to stream there the same day. Translated from corporate jargon: the streamer left and came back, and it was the platform that left the scene.

Source: Eurogamer.