Rumble, Trovo, NimoTV, CHZZK—the list of streaming platforms looking to rival Twitch is as varied as ever nowadays. However, as of early 2025, there’s only one young Twitch competitor that stands out from the rest of the landscape with its meteoric growth: Kick.
Kick saw substantial growth in the last year
Kick doesn’t share regular growth updates, but it does announce major user milestones. It most recently did so in January 2025, when it celebrated 50 million registered accounts. That’s a 150% jump from just 15 months earlier. Not bad for a platform that turned two just few months ago.
Over the past year, Kick has also seen substantial viewership growth. Streams Charts estimates that the platform surpassed 2.1 billion hours watched in 2024, a 142% increase compared to the previous year. The market watcher observed similar growth in Kick’s average viewers, which rose 149% to 258,000 in 2024.
How Kick compares to Twitch right now
Looking at up-to-date active user estimates, Kick had over 400,000 average viewers over the last 30 days. That’s roughly 17% of Twitch’s viewership during the same period. An almost identical difference is evident in hours watched. Meanwhile, traffic data from Similarweb suggests that Kick is currently getting roughly 105 million website hits per month, or about 10% of Twitch’s numbers.
While Twitch is still a much larger platform, Kick is closing the gap with its rival quite efficiently. The platform averages 3,400 active channels, compared to Twitch’s 97,000. In other words, Kick is currently generating between 10% and 16% of Twitch’s traffic while having only 3.5% of active channels its competitor does.
Granted, given how Kick has spent hundreds of millions on streamer contracts in the last two years, you could argue Twitch is actually the more efficient of the two, at least in terms of cost per viewer. Ditto for its money-making operation, as Twitch takes a 30% share of streamers’ revenue compared to Kick’s modest 5% cut.
Kick’s viewership is gambling-driven
As of early 2025, the top 10 most popular Twitch categories are all gaming-related, except for Just Chatting. In other words, little has changed since the early days of the platform, as Twitch has been a gaming-focused service ever since launching as a Justin.tv spin-off in 2011.
Kick’s most popular categories have a bit more variety to them. While gaming remains a major driver of viewership, gambling content—especially Slots & Casino and Poker—also pulls in large audiences. Additionally, Kick’s lifestyle content is spread across several popular categories, including Just Chatting, IRL, and Other/Watch Party.
Given that Kick is owned by co-founders of crypto gambling platform Stake.com, its gambling focus is hardly surprising. Twitch, by contrast, enforces stricter policies on luck-based games. It previously banned several gambling sites that aren’t registered in countries with adequate consumer protection, including Stake. Notably, Kick launched on the very same day this ban took effect.
Kick isn’t profitable yet—but neither is Twitch
While Kick co-founder Ed Craven claimed the platform turned a profit as early as its first quarter, that’s only because of the massive cash injections from its billionaire backers. In reality, the streaming service is far from profitability.
"Kick isn't Sustainable".. Kick Co-Founder @StakeEddie confirms Kick saw PROFIT in the first quarter and talks more about what Twitch is doing wrong. pic.twitter.com/2pp6bUNk29
— Big E (@Big_E) April 15, 2023
The chances of Kick becoming truly self-sustainable anytime soon are slim, as the streaming industry’s pretty tough. According to a recent report from TWSJ, Twitch was still losing money as of summer 2024, 13 years following its launch—and a decade after Amazon paid a billion dollars to acquire it.
Twitch’s struggles to make money aren’t helped by its ongoing game of whack-a-mole regarding sensitive content.
Recently, the company rolled out a new way to tag broadcasts, letting advertisers steer clear of political streamers. Lots of brands jumped at that opportunity, tanking the revenue of political commentators in the process.
This stirred up a lot of buzz about a so-called Twitch “adpocalypse,” which might have been slightly overblown. Even so, some marketers insist that Twitch is falling behind the growth of the digital advertising industry.
Here’s the truth about the Twitch Adpocalypse from an actual ad buyer. I’ve seen too much confusion and bad data on this issue. Are individual streamers to blame? What’s going on with streamers getting demonetized? Is this a political/extreme content issue or something else?…
— Devin (@DevinNash) November 19, 2024
Although Kick hasn’t faced adpocalypse complaints yet, it probably won’t benefit from Twitch’s struggles on this front. After all, any advertiser who wants to avoid sensitive content on Twitch is unlikely to instead spend their money on Kick—a platform that actively boasts about having more lax community guidelines and moderation.
Kick has a bot problem, and so does Twitch
Kick’s current viewership figures are inflated by bots to some extent. The platform itself admitted as much several times, though it insisted that viewbotting isn’t an issue unique to Kick.
Viewbotting unfortunately is an issue that all streaming platforms face.
— Kick (@KickStreaming) July 1, 2024
We’re actively learning how to best navigate with such roadblocks by tweaking KCIP.
Doing our best with the tools we currently have.
Trust me it makes our jobs harder too 💚
Sure enough, fake views are a big enough problem on Twitch that the platform has elaborate policies for handling such offenses, which occasionally result in humongous ban waves. YouTube has similar policies in place, as does pretty much any other streaming platform worth its salt.
🛡️ We have been monitoring the rise of fake engagement on Twitch and have identified 7.5MM+ accounts that break our TOS by follow-botting and view-botting. We are taking action on these accounts and appreciate all of the reports about this issue.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) April 14, 2021
It’s not really clear how Kick’s viewbotting issue stacks up against Twitch’s. Popular streamer Trainwreckstv claimed that viewbotting is way worse on Twitch because it’s easier to hide among the tons of big creators who use such tactics.
But Trainwrecks isn’t exactly the most unbiased source on the subject, being one of the co-founders of Kick. And while marketers are obviously aware of viewbotting being a problem, nobody’s really dug deep to figure out how common it is on Twitch compared to Kick.
Here is Trainwreck’s full conversation on the topic pic.twitter.com/2zb3LcagAC
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) April 9, 2024
Will Kick keep closing the gap with Twitch in 2025?
From what third-party estimates show, Twitch’s average viewer numbers have pretty much stayed the same since early 2022. Meanwhile, Kick more than doubled its own viewership in the last year alone, in addition to recording substantial growth across many other key metrics.
Given how things are going, Kick looks set to continue closing the gap with Twitch in 2025. But whether it can build enough steam to truly challenge its Amazon-owned rival by the end of the year is another story.
Since even Twitch isn’t turning a profit yet, its biggest threat isn’t really Kick—it’s the whole streaming industry, which seems to be turning into a race to the bottom.
