Massive Streamers That Have Basically Disappeared

Streaming is more popular than ever, and every year we get a new batch of superstars. People like Sketch and Kai Cenat have exploded onto the scene in recent years, but for every new streamer that gets millions of followers, there's another who's seemingly fallen off the internet's radar.

One of the secrets the streaming industry doesn't want you to know is how hard being a top streamer really is. Streaming is rougher on your body than most people think, but the hardest part of the job is that it requires constant attention. Taking a day off, changing your content strategy, or trying out a new platform can cost a streamer huge chunks of their audience. Streaming viewers are a fickle bunch, and most of them are always on the hunt for something new to watch.

Over the years we've seen a handful of massive streamers basically disappear from the internet. Some of them really have vanished into thin air, leaving their internet careers behind for IRL pursuits. Many more simply found themselves streaming to a smaller audience after controversies or career moves that simply didn't work out. Take a look at how some of the biggest streamers in the world shrank from the spotlight, and you might even be surprised to find that some of your favorite old streamers are still out there in lesser-known corners of the internet.

Ninja was once basically synonymous with the streaming industry. He started streaming full time in 2017, but his career really took off the next year when thousands of fans started tuning into his streams to watch him play "Fortnite" on Twitch. In April 2018 Ninja set his peak concurrent viewership record during a "Fortnite" competitive event where more than 600,000 fans were watching live. Even after hitting that peak, Ninja's profile continued to grow. He became one of the few streamers to really break into the mainstream from the world of gaming culture.

Ninja appeared in reality TV shows and Hollywood productions, and for a while, it seemed like he would be the face of the streaming industry forever.

Things didn't turn out that way. Since setting his personal peak viewership record, Ninja has lost 98% of his viewers. Ninja's career took a blow when he took a lucrative deal to abandon Twitch for Microsoft's fledgling streaming platform, Mixer. Unfortunately, Microsoft shut down Mixer less than a year after Ninja's move, forcing him to switch platforms yet again. On top of that, "Fortnite" doesn't dominate the gaming and streaming worlds today the way it did back in 2018. Ninja is still streaming to a small audience of fans, but chaotic platform moves, the decline of "Fortnite," and the regular forces of change that come with time have helped him to basically disappear.

Myth is another streamer whose early success can be directly tied to "Fortnite." Myth, alongside Ninja, was one of the first popular streamers to start playing the Epic's battle royale, and he quickly mastered the game's unique building mechanics. Fans loved watching Myth play competitively, and he set his live viewer record during a match he played against Ninja in 2018. Sadly Myth has lost 95% of his viewers since that much-viewed match, and today there are plenty of streaming fans who don't know that he's still around.

Myth never achieved the mainstream success of Ninja, and his streaming career started to lose steam not long after their live competition. With more people playing "Fortnite" than ever before, Myth and his fans started to realize that he wasn't really one of the best competitive players in the world. Myth started experimenting with new games, even while losing viewers, and eventually he started playing on new platforms. 

When Myth left Twitch for YouTube, he lost a ton of his viewers. After leaving his content creation organization, Myth also didn't have coworkers in the streaming world he could lean on for support. Because of that, Myth's viewership continued to dwindle. Today he's still streaming, and he's back on Twitch, but the massive reach he had in 2018 is gone.

Corpse Husband started his content creation career making videos on YouTube. For a long time, Corpse Husband's content had almost nothing to do with video games. In his videos, he narrated "creepypasta" — horror stories that get shared in online forums and places like Reddit — with his signature baritone voice. As Corpse Husband became more popular, he made friends in the streaming industry, and started playing games like "Among Us" with people like Valkyrae and Pokimane. Fans really enjoyed watching these streams, but sadly, that part of Corpse Husband's life wasn't meant to last.

2021 was the final year of Corpse Husband's streaming career, though of course his fans didn't realize it at the time. The content creator just quietly stopped streaming and putting out new videos after that year, and he stopped posting entirely after promoting some original songs he released in 2023. 

Fans miss Corpse Husband's unique voice, sense of humor, and musical stylings, but it's really no surprise that the streamer has basically vanished. Corpse Husband always shied from the spotlight, which is why he never revealed his face on camera, and he regularly faced real-life struggles with his health that could prevent him from streaming for quite some time. Achieving streaming fame never seemed to be Corpse Husband's main goal in life, so his fans can at least rest easy knowing he disappeared on his own terms.

LeafyIsHere is a controversial streamer who hasn't had much of an online presence for years. Leafy made a name for himself by stirring up streamer drama and doing his best to offend other streamers in the industry. Of course, most platforms have policies against harassing other users, and Leafy found himself running up against quite a few different Terms of Service policies.

In 2020 Leafy had been off YouTube for two years, but he made a dramatic return to the platform. Leafy initially made videos making fun of one of his least favorite content creators, iDubbbz, but it didn't take long for him to find an even better target. Leafy started making videos taunting and harassing Pokimane, one of the world's most popular streamers at the time, and they took off. Unfortunately for Leafy, YouTube took the harassment seriously and shut down his account. Leafy kept up the Pokimane harassment on Twitch, until that platform banned him, too.

Like other streamers who lost their entire viewerbase in months, Leafy found himself needing to start over again from scratch, but this time he already had a reputation for being intensely problematic. That proved to be too tall of an order for Leafy. Though some streamers have since spotted him trying to gain traction by making offensive posts from an X account, Leafy has all but disappeared from the internet otherwise.

Ice Poseidon made a big name for himself in the streaming community, but even at his peak, calling him popular might have been a stretch. That's because Ice Poseidon figured out early on that the internet rewards bad behavior. Early in his career, Ice Poseidon established a combative relationship with his stream viewers. His streaming persona purposefully tried to offend people, and his viewers responded by repeatedly swatting him. Once Ice Poseidon even had a SWAT team called in on him while he was streaming from an airport. The situation caused so much chaos that Twitch banned Ice Poseidon over it.

The ban didn't dissuade Ice Poseidon. He went on to stream on YouTube and Mixer, and his antics only got more wild. He used a crypto scheme to scam his viewers out of half a million dollars in 2022, but that's not the incident that finally caused him to all but disappear. In 2023 Ice Poseidon joined a small group of streamers who've ended up in jail after he and his friends threw a raucously destructive party at a restaurant in Thailand. He ultimately avoided a five year prison sentence in the country and hasn't pulled any of his usual stunts since.

Sykkuno is a beloved streamer who plenty of fans associate with the pandemic lockdowns that happened back in 2020. At the time, Sykkuno, like so many other streamers, was entertaining his housebound audience by playing games like "Among Us" with his friends. Tens of thousands of people would show up to watch Sykkuno work with, and occasionally betray, other content creators like Pokimane, Valkyrae, and Corpse Husband.

Sykkuno hit his peak viewership in November 2020 when he had over 100,000 live audience members watching him play. Since then, things have definitely taken a turn. In 2022 Sykkuno signed a deal to exclusively stream on YouTube. Other streamers were also making that move, but platform changes almost always cost streamers some of their viewers. The drastic switch definitely affected Sykkuno, but so did the changing interests of streaming viewers. Today, Sykkuno is still on YouTube and also back on Twitch, but now he's lucky to stream to more than a few thousand viewers at once.

Fans have been following Tfue's content creation career for more than a decade. Tfue started streaming in 2014, but his career really took off in 2018. Like many other streamers, Tfue benefited from the explosive popularity of "Fortnite." Fans would come by the thousands to watch him stream the game on Twitch. While Tfue was still playing video games on stream, he also started investing more of his time into YouTube. His channel grew to more than 11 million subscribers, but his streams became more and more sporadic.

In 2024 Tfue's career got a serious shakeup. Tfue released a video titled "I'm Quitting YouTube ..." where he explained that he wanted to start prioritizing making video content for X instead. "I feel like I can do more vulgar stuff [on X], a lot of my videos on YouTube are getting censored," Tfue said. Tfue didn't give up posting YouTube videos entirely, but he stopped prioritizing making content for his audience on that platform.

Later in 2024 Tfue also signed a deal with Kick and abandoned his Twitch account altogether. Tfue's entire content creation presence completely shifted in under a year, and for many of his viewers, he basically disappeared overnight. Tfue is still streaming today, but he seems to have acknowledged that his platform switching didn't work out. He made a surprise return to Twitch in late 2025, and while many of his fans were delighted, many more didn't even realize that he was back.

Nihachu became a streaming star at a young age. She was just 18 years old when her "Minecraft" streams took off. In 2020, Nihachu was one of the biggest female streamers in the world, with more than 10 million followers online and a dedicated fanbase who loved watching her play and build in her own "Minecraft" world. Then, right at the height of her popularity, Nihachu quit streaming completely.

"A big reason for [quitting] was that I realized I didn't know who I was," Nihachu said in an interview with Karat. She went on to say, "So I took a step back and just kind of wanted to figure out who I was and what I want to do and what kind of content I want to make." Nihachu's break from streaming cost her some of her audience and relevance online. When she finally came back to content creation, she made an even riskier move and left her "Minecraft" phase behind. 

Nihachu said that she knew early on she didn't want to exclusively be a "Minecraft" streamer, and she even tried to work in other content, like just chatting streams, when she was experiencing her initial blowup. Today Nihachu is indeed primarily a chat streamer, and you have to scroll far back in her YouTube history to find her "Minecraft" videos. She basically disappeared from the internet, but she's happier in the more secluded place she's made for herself.

Dr Disrespect is still one of the most well-known and controversial figures in the streaming industry. He made a name for himself playing first-person shooters like "Call of Duty" with an aggressive, hyper-masculine persona. Dr Disrespect is absolutely one to engage in trash talk, and his fans love his offensive humor and the fact that he can back up his talk with genuine FPS skills.

Dr Disrespect started his career on Twitch, but he was suddenly and mysteriously banned from the platform in 2020. Incredibly, Dr Disrespect managed to switch to YouTube, build his viewership back up, and become more popular than ever. Then, in 2024, disturbing allegations about Dr Disrespect and the situation that got him banned from Twitch came to light. In a confusing series of events, Dr Disrespect took to social media to admit that he had exchanged inappropriate messages with an underage fan via Twitch Whispers back in 2020, but then he later backtracked, deleting that post and claiming that he'd only admitted to the allegations to trick people.

Dr Disrespect lost a ton of deals in the scandal. Sponsors pulled away from the streamer, his gaming company cut him loose, and YouTube demonetized his channel. Dr Disrespect made Rumble his main streaming platform, and he's still there today. However, the disturbing situation lost Dr Disrespect chunks of his fanbase. There was a time when Dr Disrespect could get a million views on a stream, but now he's nowhere near as popular or relevant. 

If you're relatively new to the streaming scene, you might not have any clue who PewDiePie is. Ask anyone who's been following platforms like Twitch and YouTube for a while, though, and they'll have a lot to say. For years, PewDiePie was the undisputed YouTube champion with the most subscribers on the platform. He's one of the few content creators who gained mainstream recognition, and he's even made appearances on TV, like his guest spot on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" in 2015.

PewDiePie was finally dethroned as YouTube's number one channel in late 2022 when MrBeast claimed the top spot. After that, PewDiePie's channel remained in YouTube's top 10 until 2025. Now the channel is slowly becoming less popular, but PewDiePie only uploads a video or two a month. That's as close to totally disappeared as one can be without no longer being called a professional content creator. 

There are some truly tragic details about PewDiePie's life, but the end of his streaming career isn't one of them. Unlike so many other people in the streaming industry, PewDiePie left content creation behind of his own free will. PewDiePie's fans got to watch him slowly transition from working on his career to focusing on things in his real life. PewDiePie married his longtime girlfriend and fellow content creator Marzia in 2019. Later, the couple moved to Japan, and in 2023 PewDiePie became a dad. Since then, he's willingly put his career on the back burner.