Ninja, aka Tyler Blevins, has been in the media a ton lately. First, it was niche gaming media when he became the Twitch user with the biggest subscriber count (which at the time was 50,000). Then, his live stream with Drake took over mainstream media for the record number of viewers (628,000). Tied to that was mainstream media financial lust over just how much Ninja was making (at the time $500,000 a month.) But that may not last as Ninja is about to enter his Subpocalypse.
Collecting Data on Ninja Subscribers
When the media started salivating at the thought of Ninja making $500,000 a month, we got to work on finding out the facts. Our immediate thought was that it was probably more – but at the same time, it was going to be a short-lived windfall of cash. To find out, we started tracking subscriber data at intervals over the course of 14 days. Twitch Chat announces when someone subscribes including the type of subscription (Paid, or Prime), so it made it very easy to track. After analyzing the data, the picture became VERY clear… Ninja’s next 14 days are going to see him hemorrhaging money every single minute of the day with no way to stop it.
The Raw Numbers
During our data collection period, we tracked 4915 First Month Twitch Prime Subs and 170 Active Twitch Prime Subs. We also saw 290 Tier 1, 17 Tier 2 and three Tier 3 subscriptions. If we subtract his original 30,000 subscribers (Tier 1) before he blew up – and those numbers hold true, we can estimate his current subscriber count as:
- 218,135 Twitch Prime Trial/First Month Subscribers.
- 7545 Twitch Prime ACTIVE Subscribers.
- 42,871 Tier 1 Subscribers.
- 754 Tier 2 Subscribers.
- 133 Tier 3 Subscribers.
At this exact moment, Ninja is making $677,891 on Subscriptions PER MONTH. But, the major issue is those Twitch Prime Trial subscribers. They represent over $545,000 of his income! Those Twitch Prime Trial subscriptions have been driven by the fact that in doing so, users get FREE in-game loot in Fortnite. But as the market for it decreases (with most people having already claimed the loot), Prime Trial accounts will NOT be renewing their free trials into paid accounts. As such, their Prime Account subscription goes away and that revenue is lost.
Ninja’s Coming Subpocalypse or Subageddon
At the time of publishing this, Ninja has already lost 7000 subscribers over the last 24 hours. March 15th was the day he achieved record views during his stream with Drake. It’s also when he saw the biggest single-day jump in subscribers ever. So, April 16th will be the true day of reckoning. While we’re sure that some people will resub, we won’t be surprised if he hemorrhages over 100,000 subscribers. Or in financial terms, $250,000 lost in monthly revenue.
Granted, that still leaves him with over $300,000 in subscriber revenue monthly (along with his other revenue sources, which we will cover soon). So will it suck? Absolutely. No one wants to see their income cut in half, but at the same time, it’s not like he’s going to be evicted for missed mortgage payments any time soon!
Ninja’s income may suffer during his subpocalypse, but he is just at the start of a very lucrative career!
UPDATE JULY 1, 2018: After we posted this, Fortnite revealed a new set of cosmetics for Twitch Prime – and Ninja was able to maintain his numbers relatively high. However, as of today, he has 136,304 active subscribers – which is fairly close to our estimate. He’s still not hurting overall, but it was an inevitable drop off.
