*News reporters chatting*
*Tapping mic*
I know this might come as a surprise to a lot of you..
But, as of today... I'm going to be streaming EXCLUSIVELY..
On Blender. *Audience protests*
I will now take questions from the audience!
Umm.. Yes! You with the face!
Guy: Isn't Blender used for making...3D modeling animations and not..
You know.. Live streaming?
MatPat: Blender, Mixer. I don't know, they're all kitchen utensils!
Heck! I'd live stream on a NUTRIBULLET if they paid me enough!
*Audience laughs*
Uh.
Next question.. Uhhhh.. You! Outdated meme guy!
Outdated meme guy: Uh, yes! Uh... What-What does this do for your future theories?
Still as cringy as ever.
Meme guy: Wouldn't have it any other "da-wae".
*smacking sound with dab*
Dab to you too sir.
*same effect with dab*
huh... uh, who else?
uh- you!
refrigerator full of cash!
*refrigerator sounds*
Oh audible, you really ARE the coolest audiobooks in town!
*Matpad starts laughing and the crowd joins immediately*
Thanks for sponsoring us,
I've got time for one more question, here... uuuuh...
You!
Blatant celebrity cameo.
What's jabelling jabels? How do you feel about that new Mixer-Ninja deal?
IT WAS A MISTAKE!
[gasp]
Hold on, hold on. Sit down.
Lemme explain.
[game theory intro music plays]
HELLO INTERNET
Weeelcome to Game theooory
Proud to announce that we're still
here on Youtube.
ALLRITE, so at this point we have all heard the news, right?
Tyler "Ninja" Blevins has moved from being Twitch's largest
streamers, to exclsively streaming over on Mixer.
A streaming competitor to Twitch, that's owned by Microsoft
One that up until this point in history has gone largely
overlooked by the gaming community.
Now, why is this such a big deal?
Well..there's a lot of reasons in fact.
Ninja for the better part of the last two years
has been one of, if not THE most famous gamer in the world.
I mean, sure, there have been people who surpassed him in the numbers
and yeah, objectively speaking there are people who are better players than him.
But in the mainstream normie public eye who coudn't tell a Dr Lupo from a Dr Disrespect
If you ask them to name a famous
It's most likely gonna be Ninja
He had the good luck of being the top player of Fortnite at the perfect time.
when it first started to blow up.
As that game shattered all performance numbers and started getting mainstream attention
Ninja was right there in the same breath
The poster boy for both Fortnite
and its primary viewing platform Twitch
It was the perfect storm
A highly addictive e-sports ready game
A streaming service that was already making waves and getting supercharged by it's parent company Amazon
And a brand safe face to front man the whole thing
Well, mostly brand safe
From there PR did the rest
As celebrities wanted to get in on the Fortnite game, they were hooked up with Ninja
When ESPN magazine wanted to feature a e-sports player on it's cover
Ninja became the first
When Muppets wanted to present at the Video Game Awards, they were there with Ninja
Don't know why but it was a thing that happened
Ninja: This award is for the best game made outside of the Triple A system
Pepe - Muppet: Did you say Triple A?
Ninja: Yeah.. Triple A
Pepe - Muppet: It's amazing what they do with our batteries these days
*demonic Ninja laugh*
After EIGHT years of streaming, grinding away
It was finally Ninja's time to shine
Skyrocketing to 14 million followers on Twitch
Becoming THE most followed creator on the plattform
So, to walk away from all of that
for him to be scooped up by a relatively unkown new plattform
Well, it's a move unlike practically anything
seen in the digital landscape thus far.
And so I, and I think a lot of the internet want to know:
Was this a good decision?
Are the millions that Mixer paid
to get exclusive rights to Ninja worth it?
Is it smart for a creator to just walk away
from a fanbase of 14 million people?
Are we all aboard the Mixer train now?
WHOOT WHOOT
Honestly I wouldn't be covering this if the answer only mattered to like
one mega streamer
No, what this all really boils down to
is the relationship between a platform and its users
How places like YouTube, Twitch and yes, even Mixer
foster communities of viewers and creators
I think that there were mistakes made in this whole mixer ninja deal so pay
attention mixer here's a load of free advice heck you don't even need to pay
me for it in answering the question was this a good decision we have to
was this a good decision for whom for who whom whom let's start with the
oof
great decision on his part and that's without me even knowing or even
speculating what mixer pay damn can I make you guess based in my experience
the deals that we ourselves have seen brand context and relative valuation of
you counts absolutely I can but here's the thing none of it matters there's
something more than dollar figures at play here the thing ninja games out of
this is stability stability is a luxury that no online creator has when you
start a channel on YouTube or twitch or wherever you need to remember that
you're building your house on someone else's land and that at any point they
could just repossess that land shifting algorithms Moran safety regulations you
name it that is them reclaiming the land that your house is built on and that's
all before you even get into the fluctuations of ad rates over the course
of a year you know how every November and December people pump out a bunch
more of their best videos and then in January they basically take the month
off it's all because ad rates ad rates plummet in January and are at their
highest in November in December the value you get out of a single view
depends on everything the time of year what vertical you work on the title of
the frickin video that is how unstable everything is here but twitch is even
more volatile because your primary revenue isn't dependent on brands who
just are spending bunches of money on YouTube as a platform instead it's
dependent on fans a couple thousand fans paying you and specifically you and fans
can be finicky in the past ninja has gone on record saying that taking two
days off of his streaming schedule cost him forty thousand paying subscribers
which at minimum means him losing a hundred thousand dollars of monthly
revenue just like that if that doesn't feel like instability I don't know what
is so in order to maintain a level of success he had on twitch he was
practically chained to his desk playing the same game over and
over and over again for 12 hours a day but even then there's no guarantees it's
no secret that ninjas twitch staffs were going down according to statistics from
twitch tracker calm April of 2018 was his peak with his streams netting on
average 125,000 concurrent viewers fast for it exactly one year to April of 2019
and that number was a fourth of that with each dream only netting him 36,000
viewers on average but again on twitch your paycheck ultimately hinges on dem
paid subscriptions and as you can imagine them subscriptions were also
falling away again using data pulled by twitch tracker we see that March of 2018
was his peak 285,000 paying subscribers on his channel it is a huge number for
just one guy I mean for comparison the WWE you know the company that pretty
much owns the sport of wrestling Hulk Hogan style I'm gonna throw you in a
trash can brother they have 1.2 million
subscribers to their service so for ninja to be pulling 1/4 of that pretty
darn impressive but then again fast forward one year to March of 2019 you've
got yourself a number that is down to a mere 20,000 from two hundred and
eighty-five thousand a year later to 20 I mean it's still great don't get me
wrong 20,000 people paying to watch your stuff that's amazing that's less than
1/10 of what it was just 12 months prior that is a huge blow to your monthly
income add to that the declining popularity and relevance of for tonight
as well as ninjas challenge of getting his audience to care about any other
game other than for tonight that he happened to be playing and the writing
is on the wall but that mixer comes around with a guaranteed paycheck for
some undisclosed seven or eight figure amount presumably over the course of a
few years and you've got yourself stability stability that truly can allow
ninja to get back in touch with my roots I mean this deal should set him up to
retire or work for fun for the rest of his life if he's smart and wasn't
already set from that unbelievably great 2018 that he had heck if he or his team
are smart and good at negotiating they probably should have also had a deal
that gives them a percent of the earnings from all other creators who
come on to mixer during the month following his switch because they came
over to mixer probably because of him over on the consulting side of what we
do we've been talking to a lot of success
full creators lately on exit strategies how to successfully get off the
treadmill of content that is digital video YouTube Twitter otherwise and well
in engines case the numbers were sagging and he sold high exactly what he should
have done so ninjas decision I mean maybe I would have suggested thanking
the fans a bit more than he did but still definitely the right choice for
mixer though the situation is a lot more nuanced I mean after all they're a part
of Microsoft a multinational corporation they're not just a single streamer who
can retire after a couple years so the interests there are gonna be a lot more
complicated as far as mixer is concerned their goals are the same as any video
platform build a community of users both viewers and creators and then find a way
to monetize that community be accommodation of advertisers and fan
donations now whether mixer is getting those things is something I'm about to
talk about a little bit later but there is one thing we know right off the bat
from this move mixer exists one of mixers biggest hurdles since launching
back in 2016 has been making their presence known in a way that gamers and
the rest of the world care about as someone who's been attending III since
2013 the biggest gaming expo in the country I've certainly seen that mixers
been there for the last three years with a prominent and not altogether exciting
booth I always pass by it in the hallway and I'm like there's mix oh my gosh
Nintendo has a rock wall this year and that's pretty much it meanwhile on the
same expo floor is e3 twitch has a massive purple behemoth of a booth in
the middle of the action where they're featuring clips from their biggest
streamers like ninja but now that story has suddenly flipped on its head looking
for Google Trends results for mixer over the last 30 days it's clear that ninjas
decision to jump platforms caused a major spike in search ability and almost
double the ongoing search traffic for mixer moving forward you remember by
Google Stadium video where I talked about YouTube killing violent video
games and I spoke a lot about the power of earned media
well everyone covering ninjas move here that is all earned media for mixer so at
least for now twice the number of people are looking for mixer than they were
free ninja pretty good boost using some comparison search traffic between mixer
and twitch it's also clear that this was a smart move for mixer to poach someone
who is primarily on twitch rather than on YouTube compare twitch to mixer and
you can see that in terms of publicity and search traffic mixer has been within
striking distance of twitch for quite a long time compare the two of those to
YouTube though and it's clear that mixer doesn't even have
chance to peak above Google's Juggernog even when YouTube isn't considered a
great platform for live-streaming by grabbing up ninja from twitch though
mixer actually spiked above twitch and search for the first time ever thereby
forcing people who thought of twitch as the only viable streaming site to get to
no mixer - and while search results just look like lines on a graph they
translate to an industry of shifting priorities out in the real world I mean
most people don't see a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that happens
around YouTube talent at this point there are full teams of managers agents
and marketers who are all trying to get their creators into the next big thing
so when ninja made the jumped mixer managers and agents heading up gaming
creators as well as the creators themselves all started saying you know I
probably should have a contacted mixer I should make sure I know what's going on
over there well what we hear as anecdotal comes through the consulting
that we do we do know that those conversations are starting now and those
conversations happening is just huge for a platform that didn't exist in the
public side just like a couple months ago all of a sudden you are at the table
you are in contention you have a shot you have a ton of important people in
the gaming and digital video industry reaching out to your platform because
you mixer might just be the next big thing
well anecdotes are buzzy though what really tickles my theory bone is hard
data sites like Twitter tracker have won some fascinating comparisons about
ninjas first couple of weeks on mixer have shown not just how he's doing but
how the platform is benefiting from him being there over the past couple weeks
ninjas streams on mixer have accounted for thirty two point one percent of all
viewership on mixer which means that he is single-handedly holding up a third of
that platform remember that number because I'm gonna go back to it in a
minute but for now suffice it to say that that is a huge percentage of views
but smart witch tracker reports after ninjas initial streams about 6 percent
of his audience counting for a little less than 2% of the total site's traffic
stuck around to watch a few other streamers meaning that the rest of the
platform has indeed gotten a little bit of extra viewership spillover from ninja
I mean 6 percent may not seem like all that much it actually comes out to be
about a hundred and thirty thousand people total not breaking the bank or
anything but that number could be huge if those people do indeed come back on a
regular basis and expose themselves to more mix
their creators and if that 130,000 people talk to their friends about how
much they like what they see that percentage can compound with time
clearly then mixer has received a huge boost in PR a direct viewership increase
from ninja and an incremental gain from viewers sticking around on the platform
so ninja cashes out and mixer as suddenly in the mix so to speak thereby
making it a win all around right no absolutely not I firmly believe that
mixer has made the wrong move here that the tens of millions that they put into
ninja were ultimately flushed down the drain put through the shredder like just
a really dumb dumb silly short-sighted move but to truly understand why we need
to go into the economics of digital platforms and look at the fundamentals
of what makes an online community work and that my friends is a long enough
discussion to merit a second episode trust me if you're a creator or have
ever wanted to become a creator you're gonna want to watch that one before you
hop over to become a twitcher or youtuber or facebook ER or mixer or
linked influencer yeah that's a real thing a linked in fluent sir so why is
Oh hey! Fridge full of sponsorship cash, good to see
again. What are you doing here?
*demonic void*
Oh yeah, that's right!
It *is* time for your promo, thanks for reminding me!
Not all of us are fortunate enough to be paid
millions of dollars by energy drinks and
thanks for being here have you know Yura stepper heard of the book extra lives
it's a story about how video games have changed Society it's great I actually
just finished listening to it it's got me thinking a lot about new topics for
game theory episodes and yes you heard that right I just got done listening to
extra lives because I use our sponsor for today's episode
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