Background and career
Richard Tyler Blevins (born June 5, 1991), known online as Ninja, is an American online streamer, YouTuber, and professional gamer. Blevins began streaming through participating in several esports teams in competitive play for Halo 3, and gradually picked up fame when he first started playing Fortnite Battle Royale in late 2017. Blevins gained the notice of mainstream media in March 2018 when he played Fortnite together with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster on stream, breaking a peak viewer count record on Twitch. Blevins had over 19 million followers on his Twitch channel, making it the 3rd most-followed Twitch channel as of July 2025.
Richard Tyler Blevins was born on June 5, 1991, in Taylor, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He is of Welsh descent. He has two older brothers, Jonathan and Chris. He moved with his family to the Chicago suburbs when he was just an infant, where he went on to attend Grayslake Central High School. Upon graduation, he decided to play video games professionally, entering tournaments, joining professional organizations, and live streaming his games.
Blevins began 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 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 became the first Twitch streamer to surpass 3 million followers on the platform. Later that month, he set the 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 and 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.
How Ninja makes money
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. 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 2019. 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.
