Kick (service)

Kick (also known as Kick.com) is a video livestreaming service. It is operated by Kick Streaming Pty Ltd and backed by Stake.com co-founders Bijan Tehrani, Ed Craven and streaming personality Trainwreckstv. Kick was founded in 2022 as a competitor to Amazon-owned Twitch, with a focus on looser moderation and higher revenue shares for streamers. Kick is mostly known for its 5% revenue charge, as well as its 2023 deals with multiple streamers formerly prominent on Twitch, most notably including Hikaru Nakamura, Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, Nickmercs, Adin Ross, Amouranth, Ice Poseidon and xQc.

As of June 2023, Kick averages 235,000 livestreams per day.

Corporate structure
The Kick streaming platform had its inception in December 2022. To formalize its operations as a registered company in Australia, Kick Streaming Pty Ltd was established in November of the same year. The sole shareholder of Kick Streaming is Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, a company registered just a few months earlier.

Easygo Entertainment is partially owned by another entity, Ashwood Holdings Pty Ltd, with a one-third stake. Notably, Ashwood Holdings is under the complete ownership of Ed Craven, co-founder of Stake.com. The remaining two-thirds of Easygo Entertainment are owned by Bijan Tehrani, the other co-founder of Stake.com. While Kick is not directly affiliated with Stake's co-founders, records indicate that they are the principal shareholders of the company that holds ownership of the streaming site. Some sources also state that American streamer Trainwreckstv could be among the owners of the platform or plays a leadership role within it.

In a July 2023 interview, Craven said that "Kick is not currently profitable, and that is obviously no secret". Craven said the company tentatively plans to become profitable in one to three years through the use of advertising.

Content moderation
Compared to its competitor Twitch, Kick has looser policies against copyright infringement, hate speech, gambling content, harassment and sexual content, although its community guidelines does prohibit those behaviors, as well as doxing and violent conduct. A representative of the website said in March 2023 that the platform was in the process of expanding its moderation efforts and that it did not tolerate hate speech or copyright violations.

A New York Times article stated that some of the website's content creators have committed what appeared to be crimes, such as sexual assault and trespassing, while streaming. Other content creators of the platform have had sex while streaming, brandished sex toys at children and made sexual remarks toward underage girls. A banned user of the website once coaxed underage girls to strip while on video calls and distributed their images on Discord. After being banned from Twitch for what the streaming platform called "unmoderated hateful conduct on chat" in 2023, streamer Adin Ross migrated to Kick, where he livestreamed the Super Bowl, scrolled through PornHub and invited white nationalist Nick Fuentes on a livestream.

Kick has been called "a playground for people to be degenerate" by Kristin Gillespie, a co-founder of the New York-based Right to Unmute, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to combat racism, bigotry and harassment in gaming. She said in May 2024 that Kick has tolerated overly sexual and, sometimes, "predatory behavior" on the platform. Kick streamer Hikaru Nakamura said that the platform was undergoing the same initial journey as other social media websites, including Twitch, which he said was "very much the Wild West" when it started. Nakamura further said that it usually takes time for such websites to adapt.

Kick CEO Ed Craven stated in an interview that "people are realizing [that] the more controversial they are, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get, and it can sometimes be a dangerous mix in that regard". He further said that Kick was in the process of adapting and deciding what type of content it should deem acceptable. After a late 2023 incident where two content creators of the platform were detained by police after one of their employees tried to prevent a female escort from leaving a sexual encounter, some Kick streamers started considering leaving the website. During the livestream in question, Craven posted laughing emojis on the chat and sent a $500 donation to one of the streamers, who was later released by police without charges. In response to the incident and the following backlash, Kick updated its guidelines and added a button where users could report rule-breaking content. The new guidelines included regulations over whether the platform's staff members were allowed to participate in livestreams considered "high-risk".

Gambling content
Kick, which was founded by gambling industry businessmen Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven, who are also the founders of online casino website Stake.com, has been accused of promoting gambling content to its audience, including underage people, as well as having ties to gambling industry figures and influencers.

Kick is a loss leader to Stake. Concordia University assistant professor Andrei Zanescu said that Kick's generous terms of service toward streamers, which only takes 5% of its creators' earnings instead of Twitch's 50%, can be explained by the influx of new users that Stake was receiving as the result of gambling streamers who broadcast themselves on Kick while using the gambling platform.

UCLA Gambling Studies Program co-director Timothy Fong has expressed concerns regarding Kick's lack of transparency over its gambling content. Twitch's former director of creator development Marcus Graham also criticized Kick for its lack of transparency around its connections to gambling platforms. He stated that "there are so many red flags present that it is embarrassing watching people who I respect give this platform an ounce of credibility". In 2022, Graham called Kick a "sham" due to its lack of information about its investors.

In order to evade U.S. regulations against gambling, which have made the practice illegal in some states, some American streamers have moved out of the country to broadcast gambling streams on the platform. Nick Kolcheff stated that part of his contract with Kick required him to do gambling content (although a representative of the organization denied that such requirement existed in his contract). Kolcheff stated that he intended to move out of the United States in order to record his gambling streams, since the Stake.com was not allowed to operate in the country.

Craven stated in 2023 that the website intended to decrease exposure to gambling content. He also said that the platform had strong safety controls to block children from being exposed to gambling livestreams, as well as people who live in jurisdictions where gambling is outlawed.

Streaming deals

 * Trainwreckstv was among the earliest major streaming personalities on the platform.
 * In March 2023 Adin Ross announced he had signed a streaming deal with Kick for an undisclosed amount. Ross claimed that his deal at the time was the largest in streaming history, though denied that it was in excess of $150 million USD.
 * In May 2023, BruceDropEmOff announced that he had partnered with Kick, though the sum of the deal was undisclosed.
 * On June 16, 2023, Kick announced that xQc signed a two-year, $70 million non-exclusive deal to the platform, with incentives that could increase the value of the deal to $100 million. This made the signing of xQc to Kick the largest streaming deal, surpassing Ninja's $50 million exclusivity deal with the defunct Microsoft-owned Mixer, and further surpassing LeBron James' two-year deal with the Los Angeles Lakers.
 * On June 19, 2023, Kick signed Amouranth, though the details of her deal were not disclosed.
 * In June 2023, political commentator Steven "Destiny" Bonnell announced a non-exclusive 12-month partnership with Kick for an undisclosed 7-figure amount.
 * In August 2023, Kick announced the signing of Italian football journalist Fabrizio Romano. He exclusively streamed his summer transfer window coverage on the platform, including his deadline day show on September 1.

Sponsorships
In January 2023, the Sauber Motorsport-run Alfa Romeo F1 Team signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with Kick. Kick replaced Stake (Alfa Romeo's title sponsor) in countries where gambling and sports betting advertisements are not allowed as "Alfa Romeo F1 Team Kick".

In June, Sauber Esports announced a title partnership with Kick to form "Alfa Romeo F1 Team KICK Esports". Alfa Romeo raced a revised Kick livery called the "disruptive livery" at the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix. Alfa Romeo left the sport after the end of the year, and Kick extended their relationship with Sauber Motorsport, renaming the team to "Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber." The team will go as "Kick F1 Team" in countries with restrictions on promoting gambling, which was previously done with Alfa Romeo's title sponsorship. Kick also secured the naming rights to Sauber's 2024 and 2025 chassis, with the 2024 car named as Kick Sauber C44. Additionally, they entered the Formula One Sim Racing Championship with the help of Sauber as KICK F1 Sim Racing Team (although they would enter the first round as Alfa Romeo F1 Team KICK Esports before Alfa Romeo’s departure).

In August 2023, Kick signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with Premier League club Everton as the club's official sleeve sponsor.

Policies
According to Kick's terms of service, users need to be at least 13 years old (in the United States) or 16 years old (in the European Union) to create an account on the website. In order to be able to stream, users need to be at least 18 years old or be in the presence of their legal guardian.

According to Kick, streamers on the platform keep 95% of subscription revenue.