Why Ninja's Career Died (Fortnite)

back in april 2018 when ninja was gaining 200 million views per month on youtube setting world records with drake over on twitch and earning five million dollars a month from his creator code yeah i think the most i've ever made in a month after the creator code was like five million failure probably felt like an impossibility however the past three and a half years have been somewhat of a sobering reality check for the former king of fortnite forcing him to come to terms with the fact that at a certain point in his journey whether he knew it or not something went horribly wrong his youtube viewership has dropped by a mind-blowing 97 to between four and six million views per month his twitch viewership is dropped by an almost equally severe 92 percent from 125 000 average concurrent viewers to approximately 10 000 all while his various social media follow accounts such as instagram have been in complete and utter freefall perhaps a severe unprecedented fall was the only inevitable outcome after such a fast unbelievable rise to fame in the first place only six months prior to gaining 200 million views per month ninja was basically a nobody he had appeared on the television show family feud what do you do i'm a professional video game player i travel across the country and compete playing video games and again a small internet following of around a hundred thousand youtube subscribers as a professional halo player dating all the way back to 2009. however battle royale seemed to be the genre that ninja had been born to play he began to mess around with h1z1 all the way back in 2015. halo was horrible no one really on twitch watches it um and then i switched over to h1z1 and that gave me a huge viewer boost and by early 2017 only two years later ninja had set the world record for the most kills ever in a single h1z1 match while also becoming rank number one for north american h1z1 players resulting in his first bit of success on twitch at my prime in asian z1 when i was going for my kill records and getting 30k games and stuff like that um i was averaging like 10 000 viewers a day ninja would display a similar level of skill after switching to pub g often finishing games with upwards of 20 kills and having built a strong foundation with battle royale experience a seamless transition into fortnite was almost guaranteed first impression of the game it's fun when considering the previous information about his skill as a professional h1z1 and pub g player it should come as no surprise that ninja was a natural fortnight from the very first week he dropped his first 20 kill game only 12 days after the game's release in his first 25 kill game only three days after that the audience didn't flock to his channel on the very first day however the fact that fortnite had a new player basement that ninja had exposure to a new audience this new audience liked him as he'd carried over a genuine almost toxic personality that he developed during the h1z1 and pubg days when it only had a small following the fact that he had this small following meant he really had nothing to lose with regards to how he acted on camera he could be toxic kind annoyed happy whatever it didn't matter because it always came off as authentic and genuine in addition to this his small audience meant he wasn't inundated with sponsorships business opportunities and other extracurricular activities chewing up his time it was just raw unfiltered gaming all day every day trying to become as skilled as possible to provide the best content possible with this approach growth was inevitable ninja began to ride the tsunami-sized fortnight wave as each and every gamer was looking for a new pro player to watch 1 million views turn into 7 million views the next month then 35 million views by january 2018 only one month later at around the same point in time approximately three months after the game's release ninja had become what many considered to be the best all-round player in the game and was certainly one of the first people that came to mind when thinking about pro fortnite players with such his twitch followers also exploded exponentially growing from five hundred thousand to three million over the course of only four months placing him in the position of the most followed twitch streamer and the first streamer ever to reach 3 million followers this would help him to then break the world record for the most concurrent viewers on a twitch stream ever after he and drake's stream to 628 000 people which would then be broken again after ninja hosted an amateur professional tournament to over 680 000 people only one month after that ninja basically had a fortnight viewership monopoly for the first six months of the game he was better than everyone else more dedicated to streaming than everyone else had an excellent attitude and was a generally likable person everyone could agree that at the time his 125 000 average twitch viewers per stream and 200 million monthly views on youtube were 110 deserved however the landscape was shifting underneath ninja's feet other players streamers and youtubers were beginning to match his skill level in april 2018 ninja's peak month on both twitch and youtube we saw players like tifu uploading 36 kill solo v squad matches high distortion was dropping a 30 bomb every second day and generally speaking the skill gap that had helped ninja to stand out in the beginning had well and truly begun to close by mid 2018. as other players were becoming better at the game there was now significantly more competition for ninja's channel on twitch and in the days of pubg he explained that more competition hurt his overall viewership doctor disrespect shroud summit tim the tatman i have to compete with all these people to just take away of a huge pool of people from uh like when i you know when they're not on i'm up to like 12 13 14k sometimes in addition to increasing twitch competition from individuals like t few it seemed as though ninja began to invest less energy into what blew him up in the first place being a professional gamer and rather focus more energy on being a branded celebrity he began to get involved in sponsorship deals with big companies he started flying around the country doing meetings and interviews the last six months flying everywhere and doing all these interviews and you know meetings and meetings while he'd upgrade his streaming room to a super expensive top tier ninja dojo embroidered ninja chair uh this is where i'm gonna be controlling all the uh professional cameras in the room wrangle one camera angle two angle three for the doggy ball the room looked fantastic there's no doubt about it but it felt very commercial and it lacked the relatability and authenticity that had helped him to grow in the beginning now perhaps ninja felt as though he needed to take this path of public appearances and material stream improvements in order to continue the growth of his brand but other streamers like t few were certainly proving this to be the opposite turner was just this relatable dude living with his dad and brother at their messy suburban house in florida he'd win sometimes jump out the window reveal his backyard full of junk and continue on playing now obviously it'd be ridiculous to claim that tfu or any other creator's rise was directly responsible for ninja's four but it did show that there were other players and streamers who just seemed more focused relatable or watchable ninja's viewership began to dive pretty rapidly in the six months after his peak and in the process it would also come to the surface that ninja's extreme level of fame had brought about a further shift in his attitude and public image as mentioned earlier when ninja was a comparatively smaller streamer he really had nothing to lose when it came to being his authentic unfiltered self however after blowing up he made the conscious effort to shift his personality into what he thought the audience wanted as opposed to just being his natural self specifically for example becoming family friendly now it's super understandable as to why ninja would do this obviously the fastest route to success is going to be deliver to the audience exactly what they want however when it comes to changing your own personality for the audience you're getting into risky territory because you're starting to lose the authenticity that people followed you for in the beginning and an authentic personality like what ninja had in the beginning is not only an advantage it's a requirement it's the ability to say here's what i think if you don't like it i don't care if you then hate me so be it go watch someone else i'll still be here streaming to those who enjoy what i do ninja had become the exact opposite of this he'd given the audience complete and utter control of what he could and couldn't post literally watch this clip where he doesn't even want to shout out his creator code or make a post on twitter as he didn't want to receive backlash from his audience i don't promote my creator very much because i just get flamed by everybody i can't tweet nine percent of things i want to tweet because like people will just they just meme it they make it into a meme selfies making them a meme like why i just post clips now all ninja was doing was showing everyone how spineless he'd become no wonder people started to hate him yet ninja seemed totally oblivious to the fact that it was because he had completely abandoned his authentic personality in exchange for his family friendly pretending to be nice garbage that everyone could tell was completely fake at some point somehow it became a cool thing to like dislike me everyone everyone say anything like it on me the complaining now felt as though it was coming from a position of entitlement like he was owed respect from his audience and that it was unfair that he had received so much hate but criticism from the audience is the price of admission when you decide to become a streamer and the fact that he continued to complain about being hated just meant he became more and more hated people looked for specific things to call him out on because they knew they'd get a reaction going back to the example of tifu you could tell that he didn't even care about the criticism and therefore he received substantially less criticism in the first place now tfu wasn't perfect either he always had something to complain about within fortnite but it wasn't in the same crybaby way acting as if the whole world was always against him for some reason however for ninja the problem wasn't only increasing competition from better or equally skilled players with more likable personalities the amount of people watching fortnite was also beginning to decline in the year after ninja had hit his peak twitch's average daily fortnite viewership dropped by 30 to 40 percent fortnite's google trend graph followed a similar pattern people were searching for the game less and less every single month videos discussing the potential death of fortnite were going viral and hating the game for whatever reason became the trendy thing to do with ninja's popularity being directly tied to fortnite's popularity if the game were to die ninja was unavoidably going down with it this is without a doubt the reason as to why ninja began to play other games on stream league of legends apex legends valerian streaming hundreds of hours on each under the assumption that one of them might be the next big game now would it be unfair to say that this was a stupid idea obviously streamers always have to be on the lookout for what might be the next big game opportunity so ninja dedicated a high percentage of his limited stream time and many youtube uploads to valor and assuming he'd be at the front of the pack when the fortnite audience decided to migrate over but the migration never really happened and in the process those who wanted to continue watching fortnite got themselves hooked on other streamers who are providing that fortnite content such as cipher pk it also didn't help that throughout this process ninja wasn't even streaming on the most viewed platform twitch and had instead signed an exclusivity deal with mixer worth an estimated 50 million dollars now again it's so hard to comment on whether this was a good decision made by ninja because we don't really know what would have happened if ninja simply stayed on twitch plus the money they paid him was absolutely insane however the amount they paid him was representative of something it was saying this here's a short-term cash injection because we both know that over the long run your career is going to take a bit of a dip if you move to mixer and a dip his career certainly took in the video letting everyone know he was moving to mixer ninja came out with the same old inauthentic crap stating yes what are you most excited for about this change you know i feel like this is a really good chance to get back in touch with my roots and really remember why i fell in love with streaming in the first place bro everyone knows the only thing that went through your head when you were offered this deal was is the money worth the damage that it will do to my reputation it's ingenuine to try and convince your audience that you want to move to mixer because you want to get back in touch with your streaming roots you assume that your audience is so dumb that they won't be able to tell when you're lying through your teeth then you sit back and wonder why they hate you it's because you have a propensity towards being a fake piece of [ __ ] perhaps not everyone agreed or they just hadn't figured it out yet as 12 months after signing the contract ninja was still averaging 8 500 concurrent viewers per stream over on mixer however this was substantially less than the 40 000 average viewers he was receiving on twitch before making the move mixer then shot down in july 2020 ninja returned to twitch and he was back to getting 40 000 views per stream well only briefly only two months later his viewership had declined back down to 10 000 average concurrent viewers similar to the amount he'd been receiving over on mixer on youtube a similar decline was well underway as lockdowns around the globe were coming to an end ninja's viewership dropped from 40 million a month to 25 million a month and 15 million a month at which point it was becoming blatantly obvious that there was a serious lack of innovation and effort being put into the youtube videos most of his titles and thumbnails look like they hadn't improved since 2018 and nothing solidified this more than a hilarious tweet made about one of these thumbnails on his channel with over 20 million subscribers ninja would post a video using this thumbnail which will be shared on twitch by not luke stating someone tell ninja to fix his designer please this is hard to watch and would receive reply such as i still can't believe that's actually the thumbnail i could do better on pixar on my phone and how is it possible to be this bad i feel like he must have done it himself for some reason ninja then changed the thumbnail to a thumbnail he had already used for an older video he ended up changing it which to be fair does look a lot better until you realize it's just a re-used thumbnail the whole thing just showed that he just wasn't putting in the effort anymore not even doing the bare basics like making his own modern looking thumbnail or analyzing how other successful fortnite youtubers were titling their videos people will blame ninja's downfall on nothing but fortnite dying but when looking at someone like cipher pk who is titling his videos correctly and making extremely meta thumbnails he's only been getting more and more popular over the same period of time over the last 12 months ninja's lack of innovation has resulted in a drop from 15 million views a month to between four and six million views a month his youtube channel has become an anti-user-friendly cluttered mess consisting of a bunch of random shorts and unrelated videos which when compared to someone like cipher pk who i consider to be doing things correctly it's really no surprise that cypher is gaining five to ten times more views despite having only one fifth of the subscribers ninja knows his career is over no creator who values and respects their future as an internet personality would ever do something like his recent multi-faceted rage shadow legend sponsorship this is the move of someone who knows that they're completely and utterly finished you'd never see someone like seifer p gay or nick merks or even tfu out here doing this kind of in-depth unrelated totally different game brand deal because they know the degree to which it will affect their reputation and future as a content creator ninjas become nothing more than a puppet a jester a clown doing his embarrassing little dance for whatever garbage sponsorship will throw money at him in exchange for the final piece of his rapidly declining career [Music]

Channel: SunnyV2

Views: 5,919,872

Keywords: rise and fall of ninja, what happened to ninja, who is ninja, the story of ninja, downfall of ninja, dark side of ninja, ninja fortnite highlights, ninja bullying, ninja raging, the rise of ninja, the fall of ninja, ninja toxic highlights, ninja rage highlights, ninja twitch, ninja, tyler blevins, who is tyler blevins, where is ninja now, downfall of fortnite, what happened to fortnite, rise and fall of fornite, fall of mixer, fortnite battle royale, fortnite, chapter 3

Id: 5CfdXCpGG7Y

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021