Ninja announces his return to popular streaming platform Twitch.TV via Instagram

Ninja took to Instagram today to announce his return to Twitch after more than a year of exclusively streaming to Mixer, a former Microsoft backed streaming platform which no longer exists.

When Ninja made the groundbreaking move from Twitch to new platform Mixer back in Augsust 2019, he made headlines for being the first exclusive and publicly backed streamer , as a move by a startup streaming company to break into the market. Although this plan did not play out for Microsoft and Mixer, some sources have estimated that Ninja made potentially upwards of $20 Million dollars by signing exclusive rights to mixer, despite never gaining a bigger following on their platform as he did over on Twitch.

Similar stories were seen in other Mixer backed streamers, Such as Shroud, who suffered from a lack of viewership on Mixer when comparing his viewership numbers to previous Twitch viewer numbers. Although it is now clear that this was going to be a disastrous marketing strategy by Mixer, at the time many were speculating on how it needed to be done to try and bring the sheer numbers needed to get a streaming site to run and be successful, and there aren’t too many better names to have on your platform than Ninja and Shroud.

“So why did Mixer fail?”

It is often noted when looking at the story of Mixer is that while it possesses many similarities to Twitch, anyone who used the two sites will tell you what a vastly different experience it was. While Twitch provides a home for almost any streaming category you can think of – chatting, art, design, music – and of course video games – Mixer was predominantly a gaming based streaming platform. This meant it was hard for Mixer to grow in the way it wanted to, as they did not gain much organic growth. Many popular gamers and streamers were already firmly cemented with Twitch, having communitys and viewerships they had built for months, some even years, and they werent going to risk loosing it. It can be hard to disagree with the idea that seeing Ninja’s and Shroud’s viewer numbers drop off after the move probably wasn’t very encouraging for smaller streamers to come and try out the platform, which ultimately lead to the demise of Mixer.com.