What is Kick? A plain-English guide to the streaming platform in 2026

Key Facts

Kick.com was launched in December 2022 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, both Australian and both already known as the people behind the crypto casino Stake.com. The platform is owned by Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, the parent company of Stake, and its head office sits in Melbourne, Victoria. Ed Craven is the public-facing CEO and Bijan Tehrani is the day-to-day operating partner who has been the loudest voice on product direction in 2025-2026.

By April 2026 Kick passed 100 million users since launch. Tehrani disclosed in an April 9 post that he and Craven have personally invested close to a billion dollars into the platform, most of it routed through Stake. Monthly hours watched have stabilised in the 400 to 500 million range, and Kick now sits in third place by livestreaming peak viewership behind Twitch and YouTube.

The headline economic offer is the 95/5 subscription revenue split. A standard Kick subscription costs $4.99, of which the streamer keeps about $4.74 and Kick keeps about $0.25 before taxes. Twitch keeps 50 cents on every dollar from most Affiliates. That single number is the reason most of the discussion about Kick revolves around money rather than features.

Affiliate status is automatic for any account that hits 75 unique followers and 5 hours of live streaming inside a rolling 30-day window. The Partner tier (renamed in 2026 from the older Kick Creator Incentive Program, KCIP) sits much higher: 75 average concurrent viewers, 25 active subs, 250 followers, 30 hours streamed, 250 unique chatters and three published VODs in the same 30-day window.

• Founded December 2022, Melbourne, Australia. Owned by Easygo Entertainment.
• Founders: Ed Craven (CEO) and Bijan Tehrani. Both also co-founded Stake.com.
• Subscription split: 95% to creator, 5% to Kick. $4.99 default sub price.
• Affiliate threshold: 75 followers + 5 stream hours inside 30 days.
• Partner threshold: 75 average concurrent + 25 subs + 250 followers + 30 hours + 250 unique chatters in 30 days.
• User base: 100M+ registered users, 400-500M monthly hours watched as of April 2026.
• Mobile apps live on iOS and Android; a full ground-up rebuild was confirmed by Tehrani in April 2026.
• Multistreaming is permitted by default; gambling and 18+ content are allowed under category-specific rules.

How Kick differs from other streaming platforms

Kick vs Twitch vs YouTube Live in 2026

The clean way to read the difference between Kick and Twitch is to look at three numbers: the sub split, the Affiliate bar, and the policy footprint. Kick wins on all three for the average creator. Twitch wins on audience scale and on category-discovery maturity, which still matters once a channel grows past a few hundred concurrent viewers. YouTube Live is a third option with its own logic, built-in audience from the YouTube graph but a longer monetization runway and a 70/30 split on Super Chat after the YouTube Partner Program is reached.

The numbers, side-by-side

• Sub split: Kick 95/5 flat. Twitch 50/50 for most Affiliates, 70/30 for premium Partners. YouTube ~70/30 on Super Chat after YPP.
• Affiliate threshold: Kick 75 followers + 5 hours over 30 days. Twitch 50 followers + 500 minutes + 3 average concurrent viewers + 7 unique stream days inside 30 days.
• Audience: Twitch ~140M monthly active. YouTube Live blends into YouTube's billions. Kick at ~100M registered, growing roughly 20% quarter on quarter.
• Hours watched (March-April 2026): YouTube ~4.4B over 30 days, Twitch ~1.4B, Kick ~490M.
• Content rules: Kick allows gambling streams from regulated operators (with the casino payout caveat below) and 18+ content in flagged streams. Twitch tightly allowlists gambling sites and gates 18+. YouTube blocks unverified gambling.
• Multistreaming: Allowed on both Kick and Twitch as of late 2023. Kick was always permissive; Twitch dropped its exclusivity rule for Partners and Affiliates in October 2023.
• Mobile: Both platforms ship iOS and Android apps. Kick announced a full app rebuild in April 2026 because the existing one had performance and reliability complaints.

Where each platform wins

Kick wins for creators who care about take-rate and content latitude. Twitch wins for creators who need built-in audience density, mature discovery, and console-app reach (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch all integrate with Twitch and not Kick). YouTube wins for creators who already have a YouTube subscriber base and want livestreams to feed evergreen VOD discovery.

For a deeper side-by-side, see Kick vs Twitch 2026, 8-dimension comparison for streamers.

Why streamers switch to Kick

Three reasons keep coming up in interviews and migration announcements. First, the take-rate. A creator with 100 active subs at $4.99 earns about $474 a month on Kick versus $250 on Twitch (Affiliate) or $350 on Twitch Partner. Doubling per-subscriber income with no other change is hard to argue against for a creator already hitting their stride.

Second, contract money. Kick spent 2023-2025 buying audience the fastest way it could, which was direct deals with established streamers. xQc signed a two-year, non-exclusive package reported at $70 million with potential incentives lifting it toward $100 million. Adin Ross, Amouranth, Hikaru Nakamura, Trainwreckstv, BruceDropEmOff, Tfue and Fabrizio Romano all signed onto Kick under various deal structures. Some of those have unwound (Adin Ross announced a Rainbet sponsor swap in early 2026 and the relationship with Stake-aligned content has shifted), but the door for big-name guarantees opened wider on Kick than on Twitch by a wide margin.

Third, content rules. Twitch's gambling allowlist limits slot streams to a handful of sites and bans most casino content outright. Twitch also enforces off-platform conduct standards that have ended several large channels mid-contract. Kick allows regulated gambling streams, allows 18+ content under category flags, and has historically been slower to act on off-platform behaviour. The 2025-2026 ToS revisions, described in the next sections, are tightening that picture, but the baseline rules are still permissive compared to Twitch.

How to stream on Kick: step-by-step guide

Account creation and identity verification

Open kick.com, click Sign Up, give an email and a password, and confirm via the email link. Then go to the Settings tab and finish identity verification. Kick requires a government ID and a facial-match check before any monetization or streaming privileges turn on. The minimum age to stream is 18. Verification is processed by a third-party KYC provider and usually clears inside a business day.

After verification, the channel page becomes editable. Set the channel name, write a short description, upload an avatar (square, 256x256 minimum) and a banner (horizontal, 1920x480 works cleanly on desktop and mobile). The first impression on Kick is the avatar plus the live thumbnail, both load before the title text on the Browse page.

Setting up OBS Studio for Kick

OBS Studio is the most-used encoder for Kick because the platform has no first-party desktop streaming app yet (Kick Studio is a mobile-side tool inside the Kick app, not a desktop replacement). Download OBS from obsproject.com, install it, and open Settings. Inside the Stream pane, set Service to Custom. Kick gives the RTMP server URL and a Stream Key inside the Settings then Stream tab on the dashboard.

Paste the RTMP URL into the Server field and the Stream Key into the Stream Key field, and save. Inside Settings then Output, set the bitrate to 4500-6000 kbps for 1080p60 streams. Kick caps ingest at 1080p60 for all tiers, which is enough for most content. If your upload is unstable, drop to 720p60 at 3500 kbps before going live, choppy 1080p reads worse than smooth 720p.

RTMP, stream key, and going live

Inside the dashboard the Channel tab shows two strings:

• RTMP server, a URL beginning with rtmps:// that points at the regional ingest endpoint
• Stream key, a private token that authenticates the broadcast. Treat it like a password and never paste it on screen during a stream

Click Start Streaming inside OBS once both fields are saved. The Kick channel page flips to Live within 10-30 seconds. The first 30 seconds are usually a black screen for viewers because of HLS segment buffering, that is normal and not a configuration issue.

Channel design, avatar, banner, categories

Visual setup carries the channel before the audience does. Three things matter on the Browse page:

• A clean avatar that reads at thumbnail size, high-contrast, recognizable face or logo
• A descriptive title, set fresh on every stream (the title is what feeds Kick's category sort and external link previews)
• The right category, Just Chatting and IRL pull a different audience from Slots & Casino, Music or game-specific tags. Pick the category that matches the actual stream and not what is currently trending, because Kick's algorithm penalises categorical mismatch when viewers leave quickly

Tags reinforce category accuracy. Pick three to five tags that describe what the stream actually is ("speedrun", "reacts", "cooking", "chess") and avoid stuffing irrelevant tags to fish for traffic, the Browse page detects bounce and rerank a session down within the first 5-10 minutes.

Opportunities for streamers on Kick

Subscriptions, the 95/5 split, KICKs currency

A standard Kick subscription is $4.99 per month and pays the streamer about $4.74 once Kick takes its 5%. Tier 2 and tier 3 subs (priced at $9.99 and $24.99) keep the same 95/5 ratio. There is no Partner-only premium tier and no "Plus Program" gating. The split is the same whether the channel has 10 subs or 10,000.

On top of subs, Kick has a virtual currency called KICKs (similar in idea to Twitch Bits). Viewers buy KICKs and spend them inside chat to highlight messages and trigger on-screen alerts. The conversion to creator dollars is published inside the dashboard and currently sits close to one cent per KICK at the entry pack.

Donations and tips

Kick has a built-in tipping rail that takes 0% fee from the creator side. A $20 tip pays $20 to the creator before payment-processor settlement. Most creators stack a third-party donation widget (Streamlabs, StreamElements) on top to handle TTS and overlay alerts, and use Kick's native tipping for low-friction one-tap donations from mobile viewers.

Kick Partner program (formerly KCIP) and hourly pay

What used to be called the Kick Creator Incentive Program (KCIP) was rebranded as Kick Partner in 2026. The flagship benefit is a baseline hourly payout, historically averaging about $16 per stream hour for selected creators, calculated using a chat-velocity multiplier rather than raw stream length, so a 30-viewer chat that is actually talking earns more than a 100-viewer idle channel. Eligibility now requires 75 average concurrent viewers, 25 active subs, 250 followers, 30 hours streamed, 250 unique chatters and three VODs over a rolling 30-day window.

Slots & Casino is the one category excluded from the hourly pay layer since March 2025, after Kick removed Partner Program payouts for that category to address criticism that hourly payouts effectively subsidised on-stream gambling. Slots & Casino streamers can still earn the 95/5 sub split and tips, just not the hourly bonus.

Analytics, panels, and chat tools

The creator dashboard surfaces views, follows, sub gains, peak concurrent, average concurrent, chat velocity and tip totals on a per-stream and per-day axis. The 2026 dashboard refresh added retention curves and a session-quality score that combines bitrate stability with viewer dwell time. Mods get their own panel with a banlist editor, slow-mode toggles, follower-only chat, subscriber-only chat, and timeout windows that match Twitch's tooling almost one-for-one.

Advantages of Kick as a platform

Highest take-rate in mainstream streaming

Nothing else in the mainstream creator economy pays 95 cents on the dollar. The closest comparison is direct subscription on a personal site (Patreon, Ko-fi) which avoids platform splits but gives up live-streaming distribution entirely. For a creator who already has live-streaming as their format, Kick's 95/5 is the highest take-rate available.

Lowest Affiliate bar in the industry

Twitch's Affiliate test screens for concurrent demand (3 average concurrent viewers in a 30-day window). Kick's drops the concurrency floor entirely. A new streamer with 75 followers from social media and one weekend of streaming clears the bar without ever needing audience density on the platform itself. That is intentional, Kick wants the creator monetizing first and growing second. See the breakdown in Kick Affiliate Program 2026, 75 followers, 5 hours, payout math.

Permissive content rules (with caveats)

Kick allows gambling streams from regulated operators, allows 18+ content in flagged streams, and allows multistreaming by default. Twitch enforces a tighter rule set across all three. The caveat is the policy direction in 2025-2026, Kick has been adding rules rather than removing them, particularly after the Jean Pormanove case in August 2025. The latitude is still wider than Twitch but the gap is narrower than it was at launch.

Weekly payouts and lower payout floors

Kick pays creators weekly in most regions where it has settled banking rails. Twitch pays monthly with a higher minimum threshold ($50 in most regions). Faster cash flow is a small but meaningful advantage for creators who treat streaming as primary income.

Stream stability and ingest quality

Kick's edge network has matured fast. Average ingest jitter and rebuffer rates are now competitive with Twitch in North America, Europe and most of Latin America. Latin American creator hubs in particular have grown on Kick faster than on any other platform, five of the top ten followed channels on Kick are Spanish-language as of April 2026, including WestCOL, MrStivenTC, davooxeneize and spreen.

Support and feedback from the team

Kick's support pipeline runs through help.kick.com tickets and a partner-only Discord that surfaces faster routes for verified creators. Response times for general support are inside 24 hours for most ticket categories and noticeably faster for verified Affiliate and Partner accounts. The platform team has been visibly active on X, Bijan Tehrani in particular replies to product complaints from larger creators within hours, which is unusual for a platform of this size.

Feature feedback is collected through a public roadmap on the streamer subdomain plus the partner Discord. The 2026 roadmap entries (mobile rebuild, chat overhaul, dashboard analytics refresh, gambling-category compliance updates) match what Tehrani publicly committed to in his April 9 announcement, so there is at least directional alignment between what the platform says it will ship and what shows up.

Disadvantages and pitfalls

Audience density is still a fraction of Twitch

Kick at 100M registered users runs ~490M hours watched per month. Twitch runs ~1.4 billion. A creator who needs concurrent-viewer scale (the difference between 5 and 50 average concurrent) is going to find that step harder on Kick than on Twitch in 2026. Kick's growth curve closes the gap quarter by quarter, but the scale gap is real today.

Mobile app issues and the rebuild

Tehrani publicly admitted in April 2026 that the mobile app has been the platform's weakest surface and confirmed a full rebuild is underway. iOS and Android users have logged complaints about chat lag, video buffer events, login loops and rotation issues. The rebuild has no fixed launch date as of late April 2026, Tehrani said only that he is overseeing it personally.

Stake.com association and regulatory exposure

The same ownership that wrote the original cheques for the platform also pulls Kick into every gambling-related regulatory action. The French government opened an investigation into Kick under the EU Digital Services Act after the Jean Pormanove case. The FTC sent cease-and-desist letters to 17 US-based Kick streamers in 2025 over undisclosed gambling promotions. A March 2026 disclosure flagged a possible €49 million French fine. None of these affect a non-gambling streamer's day-to-day, but they do bend the platform's product roadmap toward compliance work.

Moderation has been uneven

Kick has had real failures here. The Pormanove case in August 2025, where a streamer died on stream after extended on-camera abuse, exposed gaps in proactive moderation, particularly for non-English content. Kick banned the involved creators after the fact and has since added context-and-intent review for borderline content, expanded harm-category lists, and required AI-generated content labels. The mid-2025 to mid-2026 rule revisions are the platform's most active product surface after monetization.

No console apps yet

Twitch ships native PlayStation and Xbox apps. Kick does not. Console viewers either watch via a browser or on a connected TV app. Streamers who pull a console-only viewer base have to plan around that gap.

How to promote on Kick

Schedule discipline beats raw stream count

The Browse page sorts by current concurrent viewers. A new channel surfaces nowhere by default. The fix is off-platform schedule discipline, same hours, same days, posted on X and Discord 24 hours ahead of every stream. Three predictable streams per week build follower-conversion faster than seven random streams, because viewers begin to plan around the schedule instead of stumbling into it.

Raids, collaborations, and external traffic

Raids are supported on Kick (introduced in early 2024 and refined since). Smaller streamers gain more from being raided into than from raiding out, the inbound traffic comes in already warm and converts to follow at higher rates than cold Browse traffic. Collaborations across platforms are explicitly allowed and even rewarded; a stream that simulcasts to Twitch and Kick counts toward both platforms' Affiliate hour requirements independently.

Paid boosts and viewer services

Kick's Browse page is sortable by concurrent viewer count, which means raising concurrent viewers raises position. StreamRise's Kick services deliver real residential-IP viewers and followers to give a new channel positional lift in the first weeks while organic discovery builds. The right play is a small concurrent floor (10-30 viewers) that holds the channel above the dead-zero range on Browse, not vanity numbers that don't match chat velocity. KCIP / Kick Partner's chat-velocity multiplier means an idle channel with 100 paid viewers earns less than a chatty channel with 30 real ones, so balance the buy with a chat strategy.

Kick for viewers, how to watch streams

Watching without an account

Anyone can watch a Kick stream without registering. The Browse page is fully accessible and most chat features are read-only without an account. Registration unlocks chat, follows, subs and tips. The minimum age to register is 13 in most jurisdictions, with 18 required for any monetization or to view 18+-flagged streams.

Following and subscribing

Open a channel page and click Follow. Follows trigger live-start notifications via browser push and email if enabled. Subs cost $4.99 per month and unlock subscriber-only chat, custom emotes, ad-light viewing on supported channels and a sub badge in chat. Mobile in-app subscriptions cost more than $4.99 because Apple and Google take their own platform cut on top of Kick's, the cleanest way to subscribe is via desktop or the channel's web page on mobile.

Chat, KICKs, and donations

Chat is the heart of Kick the same way it is on Twitch. Most channels run open chat with optional emote-only or follower-only modes during heavy traffic. KICKs (the platform's virtual currency) buy highlighted messages and on-screen alerts. Direct tips through Kick's native tipping interface pay the streamer with no platform cut on the tip itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kick.com legit?

Yes. Kick is a legally registered streaming platform owned by Easygo Entertainment, with terms of service, payout banking rails in most major regions, and an active customer support function. The legitimacy question usually comes from its ownership overlap with Stake.com, that is a real association and the source of most of the platform's regulatory headaches, but it does not make Kick itself a fraudulent service.

Who owns Kick?

Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, an Australian company, owns Kick. Easygo also owns Stake.com. Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani are the co-founders of both companies and remain the operating leadership of Kick in 2026.

How much does Kick pay streamers per subscriber?

About $4.74 per $4.99 subscription, before taxes and any regional payment-processor fees. That is the 95/5 split applied to the standard Tier 1 sub price. Twitch pays $2.50 to most Affiliates on the same $4.99 sub, Kick is roughly 1.9x the per-subscriber payout.

What is the Kick Affiliate threshold?

Seventy-five unique followers and five hours of live streaming inside any rolling 30-day window, with no active community-guideline strikes. Affiliate status flips on automatically once the conditions are met, usually within 24 hours.

Is gambling content allowed on Kick?

Yes, but with caveats. Slots & Casino streams are allowed from regulated operators that enforce 18+ verification. Since March 2025 the category is excluded from the hourly Partner pay layer, but the 95/5 sub split, KICKs and tips still apply. Twitch's gambling allowlist is far more restrictive, a gambling streamer migrating from Twitch typically finds Kick's rules workable, but the rules have been tightening through 2025-2026.

Does Kick have a mobile app?

Yes, on iOS and Android. The current app is functional but has known reliability and performance complaints. Bijan Tehrani confirmed in April 2026 that a full ground-up rebuild is in progress. No release date has been published as of late April 2026.

Can I stream to Twitch and Kick at the same time?

Yes. Kick allows multistreaming by default. Twitch dropped its exclusivity rule for Affiliates and Partners in October 2023, so simulcasting is permitted on both sides. Hours streamed count toward each platform's threshold independently.

Who are the biggest streamers on Kick?

By follower count in April 2026: WestCOL (~3.8M), Adin Ross (~2.0M), MrStivenTC (~1.7M), davooxeneize (~1.6M), spreen (~1.4M). xQc, Trainwreckstv, Amouranth and Hikaru Nakamura also stream there. Latin American creators dominate the top of the followed list, five of the top ten are Spanish-language channels.

Conclusion

Kick in 2026 is a real platform with a 100-million-user audience, a 95/5 sub economy that no mainstream competitor has matched, and a content-rules surface that is wider than Twitch's even after two years of tightening. It is also a platform whose ownership pulls it into every gambling-regulation news cycle, whose mobile app is in the middle of a ground-up rebuild, and whose moderation track record has had real failures. None of that makes the platform a bad bet, it makes it a tradeoff that depends on the kind of content you stream and how much you care about take-rate versus audience scale.

Who should pick Kick: creators who want the highest take-rate available, creators making content that does not fit Twitch's allowlists, creators who simulcast and want one of those simulcast targets to pay nearly double per sub, and creators in regions where Kick's growth has outpaced Twitch (Latin America, parts of MENA). Who should keep Twitch as the primary: creators who depend on console-app reach, creators near the top of a Twitch category whose discovery surface is already converting, and creators whose audience is built around Twitch-specific features (Hype Trains, Drops, Predictions).

If you are starting fresh in 2026, the safest move is dual-platform. Set up Kick first because the Affiliate bar is the lowest in the industry. Add Twitch as a simulcast target once you are streaming consistently. Re-evaluate at the six-month mark on whether the Kick subscriber base or the Twitch audience volume is growing faster, and let that pick your primary.

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