This Kick versus Twitch breakdown will tell you everything you need to know if you're a streamer. I'm going to very clearly explain why Kick is going to be a waste of your time in almost every case, and why Twitch — whether you like it or not — is here to stay. Given that I've been streaming for ten years, I am streaming on Twitch. I'm not out on Kick right now, because in my opinion this is going to crash and burn. It's just a flare, a little startup, and it's going nowhere. Maybe it'll get a niche market in the gambling space, but Twitch is a juggernaut, and I'm going to show you the data to back up what I'm saying.
Let's start with my own accounts. On my Kick, I've got five followers now off of my stream yesterday. Meanwhile, I've got five thousand on Twitch. The very first thing I need to tell you is that I've streamed all over the place — I was on Mixer. Some of you are looking at XQC signing with Kick yesterday and getting all excited about that. That doesn't excite me, because I remember when Ninja signed with Mixer. It was a huge deal, and guess what happened? Not long after that, Mixer was bought out by Facebook and closed down, and Facebook Gaming has since crashed and burned.
Reason 1: Twitch Is Massive and Kick Is Tiny
The first thing you need to understand about Twitch is how big it is. Twitch is massive. Twitch has millions of active viewers all the time and can spike up to five, ten-plus million. Twitch is the best place you can live stream anywhere for access to different communities, even niche games — like Gods Unchained, which I was into for a while. It's an NFT crypto card game, and there are 95 viewers on it on Twitch right now. But go over to Kick and check how many people are watching Gods Unchained there. It's got twelve viewers — I'm amazed it has that many. And some of these people are multistreaming on Kick. There's a ton of people multistreaming on Kick, and multistreaming is a crappy experience for almost everyone involved. I know because I've multistreamed all over the place. I'm impressed this category even has any viewers, but almost everybody on there is just multistreaming while also on Twitch. If you're a viewer, it sucks talking in a chat where there's a multistream and other people are watching somewhere else. If you're a streamer, it sucks trying to stream to all these different platforms, and things go wrong.
Reason 2: The Masses Don't Move
While Kick is doing great in the slots, the casino, and the gambling categories, what you don't understand is how hard it is to get the masses to come over. What you're seeing right now on Kick is that yes, there are viewers — but it's early adopters. It's people who are willing to move anyway, people who are unsatisfied and ready to be pissed off at Twitch and will easily go over and try something new. What's hard is to move the masses. The people who are happy streaming on Twitch — why are they going to leave? The people who are in the habit of watching on Twitch — why are they going to change?
I've changed where I've been at online a bunch of times, and what I can tell you from my experience is that people are very hesitant to move. People don't want to watch somewhere else. When I was on Facebook, I had tens of thousands of people watching my videos and streams every week, and I have 5,000 followers on Twitch — less than 10% of my most engaged Facebook followers moved over to Twitch after I got demonetized. I had a compelling reason to move to Twitch, and yet only about 10% of people moved. That's what you can expect the future to hold with Kick. At the very best, the best-case scenario is maybe 10% of people move to Kick. But if you look right now, it doesn't even have 10%. Just Chatting on Twitch has 429,000 viewers, and if you go over to Kick, you've got 21,000. If you need some help with the math, that's about 5% on the most popular category.
Now, I saw that XQC was live yesterday and there was a lot of hype and excitement, but that's what motivated me to go through Twitter and see what experiences other people were having. So I bookmarked a bunch of tweets about Kick to give you other people's experience — because I've seen what has happened with streaming over the last ten years, and I've repeatedly moved platforms. I've repeatedly moved my audience — not to Kick, but everywhere else: Twitch to YouTube, to Reddit, to Facebook, and also Facebook to Mixer. Yeah, I even tried Mixer, and hardly anyone came over there. So if you see some of these tweets, you might get excited, thinking people are moving over to Kick. But how many people actually moved over to this one girl's Kick? She's got one follower. And this is what sucks — she posted about it and got 58 impressions and one follower. People don't want to move. People are resistant.
Reason 3: Google, Meta, and Microsoft All Failed to Kill Twitch
Yes, the big Twitch news might feel like another nail in the coffin, but here's the thing: where else are you going to go? There's nowhere else you can go that's better than Twitch. It has the biggest community and it's got the biggest mobile app to watch on. Here's what I wrote about yesterday: YouTube owned by Google, Facebook owned by Meta, and Mixer owned by Microsoft have all taken shots at trying to take away from Twitch. Facebook did sign a few big streamers from Twitch — and where are they now? A lot of them have quit Facebook and moved back over to Twitch. Mixer, same thing happened with Ninja. Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all taken shots at Twitch to try and take it down, and they've not succeeded. Not only have they not succeeded — their efforts have been almost worthless, with almost no long-term benefit. Facebook spent billions of dollars paying creators to stream and pushing out Facebook Gaming streams. They spent billions of dollars to try and take a shot at Twitch and faceplanted on it. Microsoft spent a good amount of money buying Mixer and paying people to come over, then dumped it to Facebook. YouTube has signed over some streamers, but even though YouTube is the biggest video platform in the world, the second biggest search engine in the world, one of the very top traffic websites — even they have had a very hard time getting live streamers on board, because of the same problem as these other platforms. When you stream on YouTube, if you don't already have an audience for your live stream, it's just dead, and the features are annoying to try and use on live streams.
This is why I set out to find other people's experience: there's not anywhere else to go. Here's somebody else's numbers from the tweets I bookmarked. One guy added up the top three categories at a different time: Twitch, 600K viewers; Kick, 54K viewers. And that 54K — you can just pay a relatively little bit of money to get that many. To get what Twitch has, you would need to spend more than 10 to maybe 100 times as much money to get people to come over. This is why it's ridiculous. Those of you saying, "Oh, Kick's going to be the next big thing, you're sleeping on it, Twitch is dead" — no, it's not. I've seen the last ten years, and there's no way. Twitch can do almost anything because they're so far ahead of the competition. And even Kick is using Amazon for hosting. So many of you have been looking at this the wrong way — and I want you to feel empowered and smarter by the end of this. Sometimes you need to feel a little stupid in the process, and then learn.
Reason 4: The 95% Revenue Split Is Not Sustainable
Y'all keep telling me about how on Kick you get 95% of the revenue. Imagine someone drops 41 gift subs in your channel — imagine getting 95% of that instead of 50% of it. This is not sustainable. You know how I know that the revenue part especially is not sustainable? Facebook Gaming was giving 100% of subscription revenue, and that faceplanted. Mark Zuckerberg threw a billion dollars at Facebook Gaming and still didn't even scratch the surface of taking away from Twitch.
Now, it seems the main angle Kick is working is gambling — that it's essentially a platform to promote gambling. Maybe there's less moderation of sexual content, but it will be very easy for them to have problems with that. And Twitch may start doing less moderation themselves — Twitch can easily adapt to some of these things.
Reason 5: Paying Streamers $16 an Hour Burns a Billion Dollars in Under a Month
Most streamers multistream to other platforms in addition to Kick, and that's bad. One reason I stream exclusively on Twitch is that I've multistreamed so much over the years, I know my community hates being scattered. I know people on YouTube used to hate it when I'd be streaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and TikTok all at once — I'm talking to people on Facebook, and the people on YouTube have no idea what I'm saying. I tried to make it easier. I tried saying the question out loud, but then the people on YouTube couldn't get to know the people on Facebook. What would usually happen is everybody would gravitate towards the most popular platform. So if Kick is not requiring exclusivity, what you just have is a bunch of multistreams that are pretty much worthless.
Now, if you want to see one of the most unsustainable parts y'all have been talking about with Kick: $16 an hour paid by Kick to streamers. How fast do you go through a billion dollars paying streamers to stream at $16 an hour? I was curious, so I ran the calculation. If you have a billion dollars divided by 16, that's 62 million hours of streaming you can afford to pay for. Now, how fast are you going to go through that when on Twitch you've got hundreds of thousands of streamers streaming almost all the time, almost all day, every day? So divide that by 24 hours a day and divide by 100,000 streamers. Do you see what I just did there? If you had a billion dollars to pay that many streamers for that many hours at $16 per hour, the money would be gone in 26 days. You see how we just took $16 an hour and ate up a billion dollars in less than a month? That's how unsustainable this is.
Why a Few Hundred Million Dollars Is Small Change in Streaming
I would estimate that if you really wanted to unseat Twitch, you would need to have $10 to $50 billion at a minimum that you could afford to spend marketing your app and paying streamers to come over. The $16-an-hour promise being passed around is a joke. There's no way anybody except the very top streamers would actually get $16 an hour. What a joke. Sure, it makes for good talking points, but it is absolutely unsustainable, and there's no way anybody except the very top could even get it. And even if you do get it, remember that there were some people who were big time on Facebook with their big partner contracts, and man, it's sad to watch how hard they've crashed — to see that money dry up and to see them left without that partner contract anymore. So while everyone gets excited about a few people signing, I hope I've made the point that a few hundred million dollars, in an industry where live streaming platforms are measured in the tens or hundreds of billions, is small change. A hundred million is just a little bit of advertising money. It is not critical mass where you're actually going to move a bunch of people over. Fifty-four million people seeing one tweet is nothing in the world of people's habits, because people do not want to change.
What Streamers Actually Say About Trying Kick
So let's look at more people's experiences. I found a lot of tweets to research what it's actually like to stream on Twitch versus Kick, because I've streamed on Twitch a lot and I haven't streamed on Kick, and I wanted to see what's really happening. One person said they tried streaming on Trovo a while back, and while a few people followed, they never came close to matching their Twitch streams in terms of CCV and engagement — they imagined the new platform would be a lot of fun, and they think Kick will be the same story, especially since none of their engagement tools will work. Exactly. This is why I tried streaming on Trovo also, and I got nothing.
Another guy tried streaming and quit Kick. His Twitch channel is very small, he took a year off of streaming on Twitch, and he still got more chatters on Twitch when he returned than he did on Kick — zero chatters on Kick. That's what you're looking at: why would you stream on Kick to zero chatters? It sucks. Here's another guy who tried to stream on Kick and it wouldn't even connect, while Twitch worked like a charm. When you've got something new like Kick, it's only logical that the technology is going to be a bit unreliable. Here's a person who tried to stream on Kick, went live for 15 minutes, and got raided — and for those of you who like less moderation on Kick, you're also going to get a bunch more crap like that happening.
Here's a streamer who tried it for 15 minutes and said their favorite platform to stream on is definitely Twitch — they tried Kick and it was a blast, but they missed their Twitch fam too much. This is what I'm saying. If you try to stream somewhere new — and I've been talking about Kick on my stream, I created a Kick account because people asked me to, and we got five followers while hundreds of people came through — people don't want to switch. As I've said, I lost 90% of my following when I was demonetized moving from Facebook over to Twitch. If you move multiple times, you just keep losing people. I tried to move from Twitch to YouTube and I lost even more people doing that.
Here's another person saying it wouldn't connect. And here, to me, is a great summary: someone tried to stream on Kick and found not many people watching unless you're gambling or raunchy. Now, if you're going to do a gambling stream or a raunchy stream, then you might be able to pop off on Kick. So maybe, if 100 or 1,000 of you are reading this, maybe there are 10 out of 1,000 for whom you could get some growth. If you have zero followers on Twitch and zero on Kick, you might be able to get some better growth on Kick. But is it going to be sustainable? What sucks is when you build up a following somewhere and then have to move and you lose almost all of it.
Here's a guy who wondered if Kick would have gone anywhere without their big push — he tried it, but it wasn't for him. This guy tried to stream on Kick and it kept disconnecting on him. The last two times another guy streamed on Kick, it didn't work at all. One streamer tried Kick and got the same interaction as on Twitch — and honestly, that's actually better than what most people are reporting. And this is an accurate representation: this guy tried streaming on Kick, but it feels like there are more streamers than viewers. Exactly. Another has considered streaming on Kick, but starting over on a new platform does not sound fun — not to mention their mobile app sucks worse than any other platform's. Exactly. Streaming on a new platform is not fun.
My Facebook Gaming Lesson: Moving Platforms Costs You
The only way it can really work out is like it worked out for me on Facebook Gaming. I moved over from Twitch to Facebook Gaming, from YouTube to Facebook Gaming, and from Mixer to Facebook. I collapsed everything onto Facebook Gaming and I went off on an algorithm really hard. But of all those followers I got, hardly any of them came back over to my Twitch. In fact, I would say if I'd have just stuck to Twitch all along, I'd have gotten way better growth than by doing all that stuff on Facebook and then trying to bring people over.
Here's a guy who tried streaming on Kick, but the Rust directory is dead — and Rust is a pretty popular game. Here's a girl who tried streaming and said Twitch wasn't for her, but if your community already uses Twitch, it's going to be hard to get them over anywhere else. Another person said they tried streaming on Kick and it's not even close on features, integration, and bugginess — it feels like a reskinned version. And this to me is really telling: one streamer got about four or five new viewers while being number six in the Minecraft category. That's got to be a big category, and that's bad. So if you look beyond the hype, actually check the data, and compare the numbers of viewers, Kick quickly becomes a ghost town as you scroll down the directory. Whereas on Twitch, you have so many viewers, so many streamers, and such an established community.
My Verdict: Don't Get Lured by Short-Term Promises
I certainly hope Kick can grow and provide some competition for Twitch. The reality is, I see it as unlikely based on what I've seen before. I just don't see that this platform is going to have enough money to provide serious competition to Twitch in the long term. In the short term, anybody can throw around some startup funds. But I'm interested to see where this goes. And I can tell you I will not even consider streaming on Kick until I have hundreds of followers on there — until my community on Twitch gives me a good reason to go over to Kick. If you're already happy and doing well on Twitch like I am, why the hell would I go to Kick? The majority of streamers on Twitch are happy and already have a community — why the hell would you go over to Kick? So don't get lured over to Kick with short-term promises that are unlikely to be delivered on in the long term.
This has been a Jerry Banfield business post, where I talk all about the business of being a content creator and entrepreneur online. If you're a creator, I've put a lot more like this in my YouTube Coaching playlist. And if you want to get connected and take your game to the next level, today the best way to work with me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where I'll answer any questions you have and you can chat with me directly. The people I've worked with have been very successful online — making millions of dollars, becoming millionaires, going from renting an apartment and hoping to make a side hustle work to being at the top of their niche.
So thanks a lot for reading this. I hope this is helpful for you. And let's come back in five years. Somebody commented on my last Kick video that it wouldn't age well. I'm like, I'll see you in five years — I bet it does age well. We'll see if Kick's even around in five years.