SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 07: Kai Cenat and Felix Lengyel “xQc” attend TwitchCon 2022 on … [+] October 07, 2022 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Robin L Marshall/Getty Images)
It is a little hard to wrap your head around what exactly was announced yesterday, as the upstart, controversial new streaming service, Kick, revealed that they had stolen Twitch’s top streamer, xQc, with a shocking $100 million, two-year, non-exclusive contract.
It’s Kick not just attempting to make a splash in the pond, this is essentially dropping a hydrogen bomb into it. To put this in context, back in 2019 it was unheard of that streamer Ninja was moving to Microsoft’s Mixer for an exclusive contract that was estimated to be between $20 and $30 million. Mixer later shut down in 2020.
But forget streaming, LeBron James signed a two-year contract with the Lakers for $97.1 million. Same time period, $2.9 million less for one of the most famous athletes in the world, if not the most.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 07: LeBron James #6 of the Los Angeles Lakers reacts after … [+] scoring to pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, surpassing Abdul-Jabbar’s career total of 38,387 points against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Crypto.com Arena on February 07, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
How on earth did this happen? It’s not really a question of why xQc moved from Twitch, where he was the site’s biggest streamer and making millions there already, as if someone offers you $100 million to do almost anything, you are probably going to take it. And it’s not even limiting him to stream only there either.
The question is how is Kick affording it, and past that, what even is Kick? How is it able to do this, in addition to offering average streamers dramatically better revenue splits (95/5) that its rivals (50/50 or 70/30)? This is a site competing with the likes of Amazon-owned Twitch, Google-owned YouTube and Meta-owned Facebook Gaming, and really no one has cracked the code on how to make streaming profitable.
The CEO of Kick is Ed Craven, the co-founder of gambling site Stake, though Stake itself reportedly is not a partner/investor in Kick itself, according to their PR. Craven says that Kick will operate as a loss, which is normal for a “startup,” but the site has attracted controversy for attracting streamers kicked off YouTube or Google for hate speech or toxicity, including most famously Andrew Tate acolyte Adin Ross, who has been integral to the operation of Kick, and before xQc, was effectively the face of the site.
The theory is that there is enough gambling money to fund Kick for some period of time, but even still, the current revenue splits and $100 million contracts are certain to raise a lot of eyebrows, and even more questions. One has to wonder if Twitch is constantly attempting to cut costs to even come close to profitability, and Microsoft shut down its streaming ambitions entirely, what exactly are the long-term prospects for Kick here? The site crashed completely yesterday as floods of people arrived after the xQc announcement.
I predict Kick will continue this trend of attractive streamer terms and big-name signings, but is it sustainable? It’s easy to be pretty skeptical of that.
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