Shroud reveals one of the main reasons he’s lost viewers on Mixer
His move to Mixer was major news in streaming, but Michael ‘shroud‘ Grzesiek has revealed that he has lost some fans who are unaware of his departure from Twitch, instead, assuming that he just quit streaming for good.
Until late 2019, Twitch held somewhat of a monopoly on streaming, with only YouTube as a primary rival for viewers’ attention. Shroud, as the third most followed channel on the platform, was known as a Twitch streamer first and foremost, since his retirement from professional CS:GO.
His fanbase grew exponentially on the platform, but he took a chance on rival platform Mixer in October, leaving his Twitch channel and its 7 million+ followers behind for a fresh start.
Shroud left Twitch for Mixer in October 2019.Although there have been positives, the downsides of this transition have also been clear to see, particularly the decline in viewership. This can be partially put down to his choice of game (shroud has played a lot of ‘Escape from Tarkov’ on Mixer, a less popular title), but he has revealed another potential reason for the loss of viewership.
When a fan asked if platforms like Mixer might start handing out ’10 day contracts’ as testers, like the NBA, shroud explained why this couldn’t work in streaming.
“You can’t really test streams out, because even to this day, people have no idea that I’m on Mixer,” he responded, “there’s so many people who just thought I quit streaming. They just don’t know.”
He even said that some fans are so behind that they still think he’s a member of Cloud9, the esports organization he formerly represented as a professional player and streamer, and some even think he still lives in a team house.
This confusion likely stems from the fact that Twitch has long existed as it’s own social media website in its own right. Despite publicizing his move on Twitter and YouTube, his following on both of these platforms is not even half of what his total following was on Twitch.
So, there are potentially millions of shroud fans who are completely unaware that he moved platform, and are simply waiting in ignorant bliss for his return stream on Twitch, if it ever comes.
Of course, shroud undoubtedly factored this into his decision to leave the platform, which has resulted in losing around 2/3rds of his total viewership in the month he moved, compared the previous month on Twitch.
However, a report from Bloomberg has estimated that both shroud and Ninja could now be on contracts worth between $8 million and $13 million a year, so there are pluses and minuses, to say the least.