Tyler “Ninja” Blevins recently sat down for an interview and discussed a variety of topics about how the changes implemented over the last several months by the Amazon-owned video game streaming platform Twitch has impacted his brand partnerships, and other aspects of his brand business.
Ninja, who mostly plays Fortnite and was a pillar of the early success of Twitch, is most-followed Twitch streamer with more than 19 million followers but since the introduction of simulcasting to the platform last October, he has been able to grow his audience.
Per Stream Hatchet and Gamesquare, Ninja’s average simulcasting audience grew a whopping 108% to 23,700 since October compared to his 2023 average.
“I’ve been simulcasting for the last year and a half” Ninja said, during an interview with PRWeek. “Twitch has always been my No. 1 source of revenue when it comes to ad revenue, subscriptions and anything and everything in between. It’s been the most consistent, so to not have that for a while and to now have it back while being able to make money on YouTube has been a game changer.
Fortnite’s viewership is also going down in general, so being able to add as many viewers as possible to multiple platforms has been massive. It helps with reaching out to sponsors.”
Ninja also went into detail when speaking about the brand and monetization opportunities thanks to Twitch’s new approach to simulcasting (aka multi-streaming).
“Let’s just say you double or triple your viewership” he said. “That gives you the power to go to these brands and be like ‘ok, if you just want my 8,000 to 15,000 Twitch viewers, I can charge this much, or if you want the whole thing with all 30,000 viewers, I can charge this much.’
It also gives marketers options as well. If they only have a certain amount of budget for one of your platforms and they want to target that demographic, because all of the demographics are different for whatever platform I’m streaming on, marketers have the option to do that.
Without us even having to tell companies, they’ve come to us with deals that already have us being required to stream to Twitch, YouTube and TikTok.”
Ninja also discussed potentially adding another platform to his content distribution arsenal.
“I tested out Kick when I started simulcasting and loved it” he said. “I think there is an opportunity for me to randomly go live there.
Unfortunately, Instagram and X don’t have all the capabilities and moderation modes like other platforms, but I will keep an eye out to see what [X owner] Elon [Musk] does with X and if it’s a viable option I’m always down to test it out for them and give feedback.
But for the meantime, yeah I plan on staying with Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. It’s where most of my audiences live and I love going live there.”
You can read the entire interview here.