Milo W. January 6, 2019
2018 was an extraordinary year for Tyler “Ninja” Blevins.
The former professional Halo player went from a reasonably popular streamer to a multi-millionaire as well as the single most popular individual on Twitch.
After an exceptional period of growth for the 27-year-old, Ninja had the most viewed channel on Twitch in 2018 with over 11 million followers accrued and 226.85 million hours of content viewed over the course of the year.
Ninja’s YouTube channel now has over 20 million subscribers and most of the uploaded videos clock in at well over a million views. Ninja has also gained several prominent sponsors during this time, including Samsung and Red Bull. All of these sources of income combined together have earned Blevins close to $10 million in the year 2018 alone.
Before becoming a global gaming celebrity, Ninja was a professional Halo 3 player who competed on such teams as Cloud9 and Team Liquid. Blevins began streaming in 2011 and primarily played popular battle royale games of the day including H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. His viewership skyrocketed after he began streaming Fortnite in 2017.
But what really launched Ninja into the stratosphere was his record-breaking stream with rap star Drake, Travis Scott, and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster. Since then, Blevins’ fame has continued to climb as has gone on to appear on popular talk shows including Ellen and the Tonight Show, and was even featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine.
Ninja concluded his massively successful year with two more big accomplishments. First, Blevins was awarded “Best Content Creator” during the 2018 Game Awards. The second and more unexpected achievement was the release of an EDM album curated by Ninja titled “Ninjawerks.” The album was released by record label Astralwerks and includes tracks produced by such famed artists as Tiësto, Kaskade, and Alesso.
Regardless of what 2019 has in store for Tyler Blevin, the Twitch superstar can certainly chalk 2018 up as an unparalleled success.