Esports and streaming

Blevins began playing Halo 3 professionally in 2009. He played for various organizations

including Cloud9, Renegades, Team Liquid, and most recently, Luminosity GamingBlevins became
a streamer in 2011He began playing H1Z1, then moved to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. He
joined Luminosity Gaming in 2017 first as a Halo player, then to H1Z1, later moving to PUBG, where
he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational Squads classification in August 2017.
Blevins began streaming the newly released Fortnite Battle Royale shortly after
the PUBG Gamescom Invitational. His viewership began to grow, which coincided with the game's
growth in popularity over the late 2017/early 2018 period His followers on Twitch had grown from
500,000 in September 2017 to over 2 million by March 2018.
In March 2018, Blevins set the Twitch record for the largest concurrent audience on an individual
stream (outside of tournament events), 635,000, while playing Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott,
and Juju Smith-Schuster This stream inspired Epic Games, the developers behind Fortnite, to host a
charitable pro-am event featuring popular streamers like Blevins paired with famous celebrities
in Fortnite at E3 2018 in June of that year; Blevins paired with electronic musician Marshmello won
the event. In April 2018, he broke his own viewing record during his event Ninja Vegas 2018, where
he accumulated an audience of about 667,000 live viewers.[
Blevins partnered with Red Bull Esports in June 2018, and held a special Fortnite event, the Red
Bull Rise Till Dawn in Chicago on July 21, 2018, where players could challenge him.
Blevins' rise in popularity on Twitch is considered to be synergistically tied to the success of Fortnite
Battle Royale. In December 2018, Blevins estimated he had made close to US$10 million in 2018,
while Epic Games reported they had earned over US$3 billion in revenue in the year, primarily due
to Fortnite.] To acknowledge's Blevins' importance to Fortnite's success, Epic added a Ninja-based
cosmetic skin to the game in January 2020 as the first part of an "Icon Series" for other real-life
personalities associated with Fortnite.
Reuters reported that Blevins had been paid US$1 million by Electronic Arts to promote Apex
Legends, a competing battle royale game to Fortnite, for playing the game on his Twitch stream and
promoting the title through social media account during Apex release in February 2019On August 1,
2019, Blevins left Twitch to stream exclusively on Microsoft's Mixer platform. His wife and manager
Jessica told The Verge that the contract with Twitch had limited the ability for Ninja to grow his brand
outside of video gaming, and that because of the state of Twitch's community, "it really seemed like
he was kind of losing himself and his love for streaming.
In addition to large number of subscribers on Twitch and Mixer, Blevins has over 24 million
subscribers on YouTube as of December 2020. At the time, he was earning over $500,000 per
month from streaming Fortnite and credits the game's free-to-play business model as a growth
factor.
Due to the shutdown of Mixer in July 2020, Blevins was released from his exclusivity deal, enabling
him to stream on other platforms On September 10, 2020, Blevins revealed that he had signed an
exclusive multiyear deal with Twitch and streamed on the platform the same day.