As the biggest Twitch streamer in the world, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has an insane number of paying subscribers to his channel, but as the saying goes the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Ninja streams almost daily, often twice a day, seven days a week, and his dedication and entertainment has seen his channel explode over the past six months to a year.
He first broke 50,000 subscribers, then 100,000, and then all of a sudden 250,000 – his growth was unparalleled and unprecedented.
The majority of these subscribers came from the ‘Twitch Prime’ service – linked to Amazon Prime, it allows users to get one free subscription to any Twitch channel of their choice, and thanks to a promotional deal with Fortnite, Ninja received a bulk of these prime subs.
However, despite the prime subs lasting only a single month, many of those people either came back and subbed again, or new subscribers showed up and took their place, allowing Ninja to maintain at around the 200,000 mark.
But this was while Ninja was streaming consistently everyday, twice a day, covering lots of timezones and so when one subscription would expire, another new viewer might take their place.
But, as Ninja revealed via Twitter, after taking only two days off to attend the Fortnite Pro-Am celebrity tournament (which he won) his subscriber count dropped drastically.
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Wanna know the struggles of streaming over other jobs? I left for less than 48 hours and lost 40,000 subscribers on twitch. I’ll be back today (Wednesday) grinding again.
— Ninja @E3 (@Ninja) June 13, 2018
As Ninja puts it, this is the struggle of being a daily streamer, knowing that taking only a day or two off can have a massive impact on what is essentially your income.
For someone like Ninja, this can mean the loss of 40,000 subscribers, which translates to an estimated $140,000, had those 40,000 resubscribed.
While Ninja is not necessarily complaining, he is however highlighting what would undoubtedly be a very stressful aspect of streaming which some may not consider, viewing it as a dream job.
For those daily streamers not in such a comfortable position as Ninja and his subscriber count, every single sub can count, and so missing a single day of streaming can be extremely difficult for some.
