There’s a lot going on right now in the live-streaming space. What was once the streaming darling, Twitch, has made a number of poor choices, chiefly led by its recent bungle of a terms service change.
A new challenger in this space is Kick, who is making big moves.
The first big YouTube to sign to Kick was Adin Ross, but this week, XQC has been reported as signing a US$100 Million dollar deal to stream on Kick, and here’s the crazy bit, the deal is non-exclusive. This means XQC can still publish content to competitor services, including his YouTube channel which currently has more than 1.5 Billion views.
To help us appreciate how big the streaming world is in 2023, that figure is more than LeBron James earns in the NBA.
XQC updated his Twitter profile to link to his Kick channel – kick.com/xqc.
We often see fans of high-profile channels follow content creators to the new platform and Kick experienced some downtime yesterday as a result of the influx of new traffic.
Today, the company announced they have seen over 1 million signups for the service in just 24 hours.
Kick is promising a better deal for creators and even a creators fund later this year, which will offer content creators payment for time spent streaming based on the number of views (and value) they provide to the platform.
Content Creators are fairly trivial about their choice of the streaming platform and often follow the money, however, Kick does seem far more responsive to creator demands for new features and is adding features fast.
As with Twitch, some of the content on the service is outside gaming, and another high-profile streamer Amouranth (NSFW), has also announced she’s on Kick.