For years, Twitch’s dominance in live gaming broadcasts was near-total. Even when rivals like YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming (RIP) threw money at streamers, few serious esports organizers dared to move their flagship events elsewhere.
Kick’s arrival in 2023 looked like another short-lived experiment, but by late 2025, the platform had done something no one else managed: It made Twitch share the stage.
Kick’s growth hasn’t dethroned Twitch, but it has cracked its monopoly on where live competitive gaming happens. The platform’s aggressive revenue model, international appeal, and creator-first partnerships are reshaping how esports distribution looks heading into 2026.
- Kick had its biggest esports month in September, crossing 6.8m hours watched and 4–5% global viewership share.
- Creator co-streams aside, more top events ran official or primary broadcasts on Kick.
- Kick’s growth is geographically diverse, with Spanish- and Arabic-language markets being big contributors.
- The Stake link and brand-safety baggage still cap advertiser appetite for Kick.
Kick’s record-breaking September
September just ended and Kick has its biggest brag yet. The platform blew past 6.8 million esports hours watched, beating August by more than 300,000. At roughly 4–5% of global esports viewership, Kick is now the fourth-largest esports streaming home, trailing only Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok.
Two years ago, the idea that Kick would even appear on that list felt like a punchline. Today, it’s forcing industry trackers to redraw the charts.
The spike wasn’t luck, either. Kick went all in on September’s competitive calendar, scooping up co-streams for the Rocket League World Championship, Dota 2’s The International 2025, and even carrying the Turkish LoL TCL finals as a primary outlet.
For the first time, Kick was more than where you went to catch your favorite edgy creator. It was where you went to watch the finals for a major esports event. That distinction matters. Twitch and YouTube built their reputations by becoming default homes for esports. Kick is now taking its first real steps into that same territory.
For tournament organizers, the move to Kick could have been a distribution experiment, but it could also be a signal that Twitch’s dominance could finally be challenged. After all, these aren’t community one-offs or co-stream curiosities, they’re flagship events trusting Kick with the main feed. If organizers keep diversifying, it chips away at Twitch’s role as the ”default home” of esports.
And audiences are responding. Peak concurrent views have more than doubled in the past year and a half, climbing from one million to 2.5 million. Competitive titles like CS2, Dota 2, and League of Legends, once fringe categories on the platform, now anchor its top-watched list. Esports are no longer an afterthought on the platform.
What this means is simple but significant: Kick isn’t just a side hustle for gambling streams anymore.
Kick has earned its spot at the table
Twitch still commands the biggest stages (the MSI 2025 grand finals pulled massive numbers on its platform), but Kick is prying open cracks in its armor.
The most dramatic example came in Spanish-speaking markets, where Kick overtook Twitch by mid-2025, seizing roughly 60% of audience share by July. This wasn’t a blip, as Kick pulled ahead on July 3 and stayed there for weeks, showing a genuine shift in Latin America and Spain.
Globally, the numbers are just as startling. In Q2 2025, Kick crossed 1 billion hours watched in a single quarter, joining Twitch and YouTube in the exclusive 10-figure club. That put Kick at 11% of all live-streaming hours.
Twitch’s overall share still towers at around 59% as of early 2025, but the optics have shifted: creators and viewers have a viable alternative, and they’re moving. For the most part, viewers go where the creators are, and creators are tempted by more attractive financial conditions. Even disregarding multi-million deals, Kick’s 95/5 revenue split looks super attractive compared to Twitch’s 50/50 one.
Twitch is thus no longer the only gatekeeper as platforms are bidding for loyalty, and streamers are finally the ones with leverage. Live streaming isn’t a one-platform monopoly anymore. It’s a contest, and right now, Kick is proving it belongs in the ring.
How Kick outflanked Twitch on two fronts
A big part of Kick’s rise is content. Rather than relying solely on individual streamers, Kick is investing in producing events and shows that draw viewers in.
The centerpiece of this push is Kick Studios, a production initiative launched in 2025 to create exclusive livestreamed events. In June, Kick announced a partnership with top influencer collective OTK (One True King) to co-produce a year-long series of events.
The first outing, a live Kick x OTK collab stream from Austin on June 13, featured popular personalities like Asmongold (an OTK founder who recently started streaming on Kick), ExtraEmily, Sodapoppin, and others, and was broadcast exclusively on Kick. Upcoming projects include a souped-up revival of OTK’s Game Day tournament and more “event streams” rolling out over the next year.
For Kick, teaming with OTK is a signal that it’s serious about pipeline programming and curated content that goes beyond any one streamer’s channel. It’s a playbook Twitch used in the past with events such as Twitch Rivals, but Kick is executing it with a fresh twist, by essentially outsourcing to a streamer-led studio.
The allure is mutual: OTK gets creative freedom and a dedicated platform, while Kick gains must-see programming to entice viewers from creators who understand their audience best. This strategy recognizes that exclusive content can pull in audiences that might not otherwise try a new platform.
As one OTK founder put it, Kick was “willing to just let OTK be OTK, hair down and all”, giving the group creative control to authentically connect with fans. In an era where big streamers alone don’t guarantee long-term loyalty as many of Kick’s star signings are non-exclusive and still dabble on other platforms, owning unique content is key to keeping viewers in the Kick ecosystem.
This also highlights a gap Twitch has left behind. Twitch Rivals once promised to be the platform’s content engine, but in recent years it’s struggled to maintain cultural momentum.
By letting OTK take the reins, Kick positioned itself as the fun, experimental alternative: a place where streamer-led creativity drives the schedule instead of corporate programming. This is something especially valuable in a Gen Z-dominated market where authenticity is valued over all.
The global gamble that’s paying off
The other prong of Kick’s growth plan is going global. Unlike Twitch, which for years was dominated by English-speaking content, Kick has from the start cultivated a diverse, international user base. In fact, between late 2024 and mid-2025, Spanish-language streams accounted for the same share of Kick’s viewership as English streams, about 27.7% each.
The Arabic-speaking community is not far behind, making up roughly 18-20% of Kick’s hours watched during the same period. Turkish streams, meanwhile, are climbing fast at roughly 12%.
This multilingual surge explains how Kick leapfrogged Twitch in certain regions. For example, Spain and LATAM saw popular streamers like IlloJuan and WestCOL embrace Kick, bringing their massive fanbases over. Similarly, Kick attracted Middle Eastern creators such as DrB7h, who became one of the platform’s top streamers with tens of millions of hours watched.
By nurturing these regional communities, Kick isn’t just picking off Twitch’s smaller markets–it’s building a truly global footprint that can rival Twitch’s. Twitch has noticed this, and recently launched programs to support streamers in Latin America. However, Kick had its flag firmly planted in both Spanish- and Arabic-language markets by then.
How Twitch is responding
Over at Team Purple, 2025 has brought a wave of changes aimed at shoring up streamer loyalty–changes that not coincidentally address many complaints that led creators to consider Kick in the first place. In an open letter in early 2025, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy acknowledged the need to make Twitch “the absolute best place” for streamers of all sizes, and he’s backed that up with a series of monetization overhauls.
The biggest shift? Monetization is no longer exclusive to Affiliates and Partners–it’s now virtually open to everyone, from day one. As Clancy put it, Twitch has unlocked subscriptions, Bits (Twitch’s donation currency), emotes, and other revenue tools “to most streamers, from day one” of their streaming journey.
That’s a radical departure from Twitch’s old model, where you needed to grind to 50 followers and meet the Affiliate criteria to start monetizing. By removing the gatekeeping on subs and Bits, Twitch is trying to match the allure of Kick’s easy monetization and 95/5 monetization split.
Twitch’s move was applauded as a win for small creators who can now start earning “from day 1” instead of streaming for free. Some veterans grumbled that newcomers hadn’t earned it, but others noted day-one sub buttons mean little without viewers.
To accompany the open floodgates, Twitch also introduced a “Spendable Balance” system, which essentially lets streamers who haven’t hit payout thresholds reinvest whatever bits and subs they do earn back into Twitch.
It’s a clever, if somewhat self-serving, idea that keeps more money circulating within Twitch’s ecosystem and encourages streamers to support each other, all while Twitch avoids cutting lots of small payout checks.
On top of that, Twitch slashed the requirements for its Affiliate program in mid-2025 by dropping the needed stream hours from 8 to 4, streaming days from 7 to 4, and follower count from 50 to 25.
Perhaps even more striking, Twitch has also revisited the fine print of its streamer agreements. Under the new Monetized Streamer Agreement that rolled out in 2023, Twitch effectively merged the Partner and Affiliate contracts into one set of terms and removed streaming exclusivity requirements for all. This means a Twitch Partner is now officially free to stream elsewhere without fear of breach.
It’s a far cry from the old days when being a Partner meant you were Twitch-only. The trade-off is that Partners also lost some special status as they’re now on the same standard contract as Affiliates, with no fixed-term deals or personalized support in many cases.
Still, this change was crucial in blunting one of Kick’s selling points: Twitch no longer penalizes you for exploring other outlets. All of these pivots highlight how Twitch is adapting to the Kick era now that it’s no longer the only lucrative streaming platform in town.
With Kick proving that creators will move if money talks, Twitch’s newfound generosity is a clear sign that competition is benefiting streamers. Monetization, once a key pain point, is now a frontline in the Twitch vs. Kick battle, and Twitch is showing it can change for the better, even if it was pressured to do so.
Who’s got the biggest Stake in the game
For all of Kick’s momentum, not everyone is convinced it’s ready for prime time. The skepticism largely centers on who owns it and what’s allowed on the platform.
Kick was founded and funded by the co-owners of Stake.com, an offshore crypto gambling site, as a friendly haven for the kind of gambling content that Twitch cracked down on. This origin story has always raised eyebrows. Essentially, Kick exists in symbiosis with an online casino: In Kick’s early days, top streamers like Trainwreckstv and Adin Ross were effectively paid to promote Stake by streaming gambling for hours on end.
Stake’s co-founder Ed Craven insists that Kick is run independently of Stake’s finances, but few in the industry believe Kick could burn cash on 95/5 splits and big contracts without Stake’s deep pockets behind it. Even a Kick exec casually referred to Stake as Kick’s “sister company”.
This tight relationship means Kick faces a trust gap with advertisers and some creators which makes it hard to shake the perception that the platform’s true purpose is to funnel viewers to a crypto casino. As marketing executive Tina Mulqueen recently put it: Kick’s Stake connection is “a red flag right off the bat” from an advertising perspective.
Compounding those concerns is Kick’s track record on content moderation and brand safety. In its push to differentiate from Twitch, Kick adopted a much looser stance on acceptable content, especially in its first year.
The result? A “Wild West” period where some Kick streamers pushed the envelope with edgy or outright toxic behavior, NSFW content, and even illegal streams. One of the most high-profile examples that ticks several of those boxes is Adin Ross’s infamous 2023 broadcast where he illegally restreamed Super Bowl LVII and even opened a porn site on air.
From Wild West to damage control
More recently, Kick has taken steps to clean up its act. It introduced stricter rules against nudity and sexual content, hired dozens of human moderators, and deployed AI moderation tools to police streams.
These measures have helped somewhat, as you’ll no longer find blatant pornographic streams on the homepage. Still, brand safety remains a sticking point for Kick, with advertisers and sponsors remaining cautious.
Kick’s leadership knows about the stigma—and leans into it. They’ve framed the platform’s “edgier” vibe as not a bug but a feature, telling marketers that if you want to reach 18–34-year-old men who like provocative content, Kick is your place.
That positioning—appealing to high-end liquor, gaming PC, and energy drink sponsors instead of, say, Disney—shows Kick understands it can’t be everything to everyone. The risk is that doubling down on that image could box it in and limit its revenue potential.
Then there’s the looming risk of regulatory or app store blowback, given its gambling ties. Apple or Google could take issue if real-money gambling becomes too prominent or if Kick fails to keep extreme content in check.
So far, Kick’s avoided those landmines. But trust remains its biggest hurdle: will major advertisers ever back a platform born from a crypto casino and once seen as streaming’s Wild West?
Can Kick keep kicking?
As 2025 winds down, Kick’s in a position few expected a year ago—actually competing with Twitch. Its September surge proved it’s not a flash in the pan: the platform has found an audience, landed major talent, and forced rivals to adapt.
The question now is whether it can keep that momentum going into 2026.
Optimists argue that real competition is making the whole ecosystem healthier. Streamers are getting better deals—Kick’s 95/5 split pushed Twitch to improve its own monetization—and viewers have more choice than ever. Twitch may lean harder into esports and community features, while Kick builds its identity around creator-driven, anything-goes content.
Even emerging games and esports circuits like Marvel Rivals offer Kick a chance to stake out new territory and nurture early communities, much like the early days of the streaming wars in video-on-demand, when competition drove every platform to find its niche.
Still, there are reasons to be cautious. Kick’s generous payouts and heavy streaming costs (it reportedly rents Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, unlike Twitch which owns its tech) rely on steady funding from its backers. So far, Stake’s bankroll and the founders’ deep pockets have kept things running smoothly. But eventually, Kick will need a self-sustaining business model.
Right now, revenue comes mainly from a few sponsors, limited ads, and tiny subscription cuts. If profitability becomes a demand, Kick may have to make hard choices: add more ads and risk backlash, reduce the sub split, or find new monetization paths. And if regulators ever clamp down on crypto gambling and hurt Stake’s operations, Kick’s own finances could take a hit.
There’s also the possibility that esports leagues stop playing favorites altogether. If non-exclusive deals become standard with broadcasts running on both Twitch and Kick, the real battle shifts from who owns the rights to who monetizes better. In that scenario, Kick’s task isn’t winning exclusives anymore, but turning shared streams into loyal, self-sustaining communities.
If all three major platforms keep one-upping each other, we could see a new balance emerge: Twitch as the all-purpose giant, YouTube as the VOD-and-stream hybrid with massive reach, and Kick as the upstart where edgy content and big-pocketed creators thrive.
Consolidation isn’t off the table either, as Kick’s co-founder once floated the idea of “buying out” Twitch. That may be far-fetched, but partnerships or blurred boundaries—like esports leagues streaming on both platforms—are definitely possible.
So, can Kick keep kicking? The momentum’s there, the funding’s there (for now), and creators are eager. The next few months will reveal whether it’s a lasting contender or just riding a longer post-launch wave. What’s clear is that live streaming in late 2025 is more competitive than ever.
Whether you’re a streamer chasing opportunity or a viewer flipping between Gen.G vs. T1 and the next Marvel Rivals showdown, you’re watching a new chapter unfold—one where Kick broke Twitch’s monopoly and helped reshape the game for good.
