Ninja (Richard Tyler Blevins) fortune

Short introduction

Richard Tyler Blevins (born June 5, 1991), better known by his online alias Ninja, is an American streamer, YouTuber, a professional gamer, and an internet personality.

Blevins had made his entry into streaming by participating in several esports teams, but his popularity waned when he started playing Fortnite Battle Royale in March 2018. Blevin’s popularity increased in line with Fortnite’s popularity. Before Blevins gave up his Twitch profile in favor of Mixer in August 2019, he had over 14 million followers and was the most subscribed Twitch channel.

Early life

Richard Tyler Blevins was born on June 5, 1991 to American parents of Welsh descent. Born in the Detroit area, he and his family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was one year old. His youth in the Chicago suburbs included video games and sports. He attended Grayslake Central High School, where he played soccer – at the same time, he was also an avid video player. Upon graduation, he decided to play video games professionally, participate in tournaments, join professional organizations, and stream his games live.

Career

Blevins started playing Halo 3 professionally in 2009. He played for various organizations, including Cloud9, Renegades, Team Liquid and most recently Luminosity Gaming. Blevins became a streamer in 2011. He started playing H1Z1 and then switched to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. He switched to Luminosity Gaming as a Halo player in 2017 and then to H1Z1. He later moved to PUBG, where he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational Squads rating in August 2017.

Blevins started streaming the newly released Fortnite Battle Royale shortly after PUBG Gamescom Invitational. His audience numbers started to grow, which coincided with the game’s popularity in late 2017 / early 2018. His followers on Twitch had grown from 500,000 in September 2017 to over 2 million in March 2018.

In March 2018, Blevins set the Twitch record for the largest simultaneous audience in a single stream (outside of tournament events), 635,000, while playing Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott, and Juju Smith cobbler. This stream inspired Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, to host a non-profit Pro-Am event with popular streamers like Blevins and famous stars in Fortnite at E3 2018 in June of the year. Blevins and the electronic musician Marshmello won the event. In April 2018, he broke his own audience record during his Ninja Vegas 2018 event, in which he assembled an audience of around 667,000 live viewers.

Blevins partnered with Red Bull Esports in June 2018 and hosted a special Fortnite event, the Red Bull Rise Till Dawn, in Chicago on July 21, 2018, where players could challenge him.

Blevin’s growing popularity at Twitch is seen as synergistic with the success of Fortnite Battle Royale. In December 2018, Blevins estimated that he had earned $ 10 million in 2018, while Epic Games reported that they had made over $ 3 billion in sales that year, mainly due to Fortnite.

Reuters reported that Electronic Arts’ Blevins raised $ 1 million to promote Apex Legends, a competitive Battle Royale game for Fortnite, to play the game on its Twitch stream, and to promote the title on social media. Account received during the Apex release in February 2019.

Blevins left Twitch on August 1, 2019 to stream exclusively on Microsoft’s mixer platform on August 1, 2019. His wife and manager Jessica told The Verge that the contract with Twitch had limited Ninja’s ability to expand its brand outside of the video game.

In addition to a large number of subscribers to Twitch and Mixer, Blevins had over 22 million subscribers to YouTube in September 2019. At that point, he was making over $ 500,000 a month streaming Fortnite, making the game’s free business model a growth factor.

Career highlights

Blevins and his family were featured in several episodes of the Family Feud television show in 2015, while he became increasingly popular as a professional video player. According to The Brillion News, Blevins was the reason why he and his team made it onto the show. In one episode that aired in August 2019, his family returned as a candidate on Celebrity Family Feud after gaining more fame.

In September 2018, Blevins was the first professional esports player to appear on the cover of ESPN The Magazine, which marked a breakthrough in the mainstream sports world.

Blevins collaborated with the record label Astralwerks in October 2018 to create an album titled Ninjawerks: Vol. 1 with original songs by electronic music players, including Alesso, Nero, Tycho and 3LAU. Blevins was not only a fan of these artists, but also saw the album as “another big step towards bridging the gap between musicians and players”. The album was released on December 14, 2018.