Since its initial announcement in 2022, Kick has quickly becoming one of the biggest streaming platforms on the planet. Its notoriety is a product a variety of successes and controversies attached to the platform, and through it all, one thing has been firmly established: Kick is here to stay in the streaming space, and other platforms will have to continue contending with it as a result.
Kick was originally brought about in October 2022, though the streaming platform didn’t go live as its users recognize today until December 2022, a short time later. The streaming platform immediately made a splash as a prominent alternative to popular competitors of the day, most especially Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch.
Kick was only the latest platform to make such an effort. YouTube Gaming had launched as an arm of the popular video hosting website YouTube in 2015 with similar intentions. One year later, technology giant Microsoft launched its own streaming platform, Mixer, as an entry into the growing competition.
Both YouTube Gaming and Mixer made waves in the livestreaming space by signing content creators to exclusivity contracts worth big money, intended to carve chunks of audience away from Twitch. But YouTube Gaming folded in 2019, and Mixer followed it just one year later. Twitch was again left relatively unchallenged.
That changed when Kick was announced in 2022. Funded by gambling giant Stake, Kick was the next platform in line to challenge Twitch’s dominance in the streaming space. And the new platform had a plan for that competition.
Seeking to make its own mark in the streaming world, Kick would go on to announce a very generous 95/5 split of streaming revenue towards streamers. This was a major change relative to the established norm, as Twitch was known for taking significant cuts of any revenue its streamers managed to create. By offering so much better a percentage, Kick instantly made itself an attractive destination for many streamers whether they were new to content creation or established names.
Established names were also central to Kick’s strategy. In 2023, the platform’s first full year of formal operations, Kick signed deals with some of the biggest content creators associated with Twitch. These deals were made with a broad variety of streamers who appealed to different audiences.
Notable names included former Overwatch pro Felix “xQc” Lengyel, world-ranked chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, popular content creator Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, Fortnite pro and former 100 Thieves streamer Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff, and others.
Kick was able to support itself through these aggressive signings and generous revenue splits in large part because the platform is not required by its owners at Stake to be profitable. Rather, Kick is operated as a loss leader, a project that operates at a deficit but is relied on for its community outreach and overall marketing potential.
Kick has also established a reputation for having looser moderation than that of rival platform Twitch. While Twitch has often gotten into hot water for its inconsistent moderation policies regarding its streamers, Kick sought to lower the moderation barrier and allow content creators more freedom to express themselves.
This led to the migration of some popular streamers who had fallen out of favor with Twitch, including Adin Ross and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell.
While this broader freedom has been welcomed by some streamers and their fans, others in the streaming community have criticized Kick for some of the content allowed on the platform. This has led to multiple reevaluations and clarifications on the part of Kick, though it continues to be a more open platform in its moderating policies than does Twitch.
Kick has also separated itself by being welcoming of gambling and betting streams so long as the games are played in regions in which they’re legally allowed. The platform has made additional inroads internationally and with non-English -language streams. Some of the platform’s most popular content creators, including Luis “Westcol” Alvarez, stream in Spanish or other languages besides English, and the platform has seen significant growth in Latin America and Middle Eastern regions.
Now multiple years into its operation, Kick has made it clear that the platform is in it for the long haul, and its growing number of streamers and overall users speak to that reality.
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