About kick

 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.^[1][2][3] 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.^[4][1][5]

As of June 2023, Kick averages 235,000 livestreams per day.^[4]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[6] Some sources also state that American streamer Trainwreckstv could be among the owners of the platform or plays a leadership role within it.^[7][8]

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.^[1][9] 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.^[1]

Kick's more lenient approach toward content moderation has been praised by critics of Twitch's stricter content policies. It has also attracted controversial content creators to the platform. 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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[1][9][10]

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.^[11] 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.^[10]

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".^[10]

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.^[12]

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.^[10]

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".^[12] In 2022, Graham called Kick a "sham" due to its lack of information about its investors.^[7]

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.^[10] 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.^[13]

Craven stated in 2023 that the website intended to decrease exposure to gambling content.^[12] 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.^[10]