Well-known Twitch streamer, Ninja, has recently shattered the record for most concurrent views by an individual streamer. The previous record had been set by Dr. DisRespect at 388,00 viewers, but now has been replaced with the new total of 621,603.
The reason? Ninja’s stream was a celebrity-filled Fortnite gaming session. Pittsburgh Steelers’ wide receiver Juju Smith-Schuster, as well as rappers Travis Scott and Drake, were all shown on stream. At the time of viewing, Drake and Ninja were seen trending on Twitter. The stream also became much more prominent once Drake tweeted out a link to view the stream.
playing fort nite with @ninja https://t.co/OSFbgcfzaZ
— Drizzy (@Drake) March 15, 2018
In the aftermath of the stream, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins was interviewed by CNBC to talk about his channel. Blevins stated his channel generates $500K a month by streaming. He also went on to leave words of advice for up and coming streamers.
“Honestly, I encourage everyone to do that. All the kids out there: you can’t just drop everything to focus on playing video games for a living. It’s also becoming a very competitive career choice. You want to make sure you’re securing your future while putting the extra time to make this happen as well.”
These words of advice can hopefully reach a wide audience as streaming begins to enter the mainstream. Twitch had previously been acquired in 2014 by Amazon for close to $1 billion in cash. Amazon Prime users have also been able to access the premium version of Twitch, as part of its membership.