By Matt Craig , Forbes Staff
Like many entrepreneurs, 29-year-old streaming queen Caitlin Siragusa is making money while she sleeps. In this case, her millions of followers will see her doing it, and they'll love that she chats with them in a skimpy bikini during the day. But the savvy creator, who once claimed he could make $15,000 a day without getting out of bed, recently shocked the streaming world by moving more than 30 million active users from Twitch to the Kikswitch/platform in June. He offered her. A non-exclusive contract worth about $7 million a year could push his two-year deal up to $30 million with performance incentives, Forbes found.
"I feel like I'm finally being recognized as a person and not just a brand threat," says Amoranz, who has been banned from Amazon-backed Twitch at least six times for violating its terms of service regarding NSFW content. No explanation… With such a lucrative new deal in hand, he's also likely to start moral policing at the start of his relationship with the now-commercial Stake.com online cryptocurrency-backed casino.
"The price is boring," says Amorant, "and it's expensive."
The founders of Kik, which launched in December, are learning a quick lesson. Stack was co-founded by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, who own the platform through their Australian company Easygo, and their Curacao-licensed gaming operation is expected to generate $2.6 billion in revenue by 2022, the company said. Company by Forbes . Last year, Stake sponsored several popular Twitch creators to allow viewers to play online slots, until Twitch banned Stake and other unregulated crypto casinos from all of its channels in October, citing a lack of player protection. Consumers as proof of age.
Craven, the 27-year-old Kik CEO, has publicly said he's willing to invest aggressively to make Twitch a viable competitor for creators, offering support and astronomical fees that Twitch doesn't. In addition to the Amaranth deal, Kik also brought Felix "xQc" Lengel, Twitch's most watched player for the past three years, to a two-year contract worth at least $70 million and potential top-tier incentives. . 100 million dollars. (To put this into perspective, LeBron James agreed to a new two-year contract with the Los Angeles Lakers last year for just $97.1 million.)
And Kick is not made in the market. In a recent interview with creator Jake Lockey, Craven said he plans to spend another $100 million to bring others onto Kick's new platform.
"We're going to be the dominant streaming platform in this," Tehran said. “There's a huge opportunity that we can't take right now. We believe that putting innovators first, regardless of their size, will drive our success.”
The question is how Kik plans to recoup its huge investment. Craven says advertising will be its main revenue stream, but Kik has yet to offer pre- and mid-air trailers for its new service. Meanwhile, Twitch posts 2.5 minutes of ads per hour, a channel 13 times more active than Kick.
Even more shocking is the revenue Kik promises creators. Twitch, which had $2.8 billion in revenue last year, currently takes a 50% cut of subscription fees from streams, while Kick lets creators keep 95% of the fee. Tehrani told Forbes that the company hopes to develop a larger ecosystem of products and services in the future, but the diversity has led some analysts to conclude that Kik is not profitable for Stack beyond acquiring customers.
"In my more than 20 years of experience in the live streaming industry, there's not even a path to profitability or revenue based on what we're seeing right now," he says. Marcus "djWheat" Graham, former head of creative development at Twitch and popular esports broadcaster. “The only place I can come to is that Stack realizes that this is a way for creators to introduce gambling to people. But to build an entire platform around it is a bit disingenuous."
The xQc and Amoranz deals do not involve or promote gambling in any way, according to their agent Ryan Morrison, who confirmed that they are paid in dollars, not shares. The deals are non-exclusive, meaning they can still be streamed on Twitch, Amorant has built up over six million followers and xQc has almost 12 million, and was ranked 12 by Forbes last year. 1st place in the list of the best. Creators of the world. The duo is believed to be able to transport their audience through time to Kik.
So far, the expensive activity is paying off. Within a month of xQc's sign-up, Kik more than doubled its number of accounts, doubled the number of active streamers and increased total watch hours by 44% to 84 million, according to StreamCharts. That's still 20 times less than Twitch's 1.7 billion hours watched last month, but Kik is now considered Twitch's strongest and most significant competitor for market dominance. (Twitch declined to comment to Forbes .)
Kick isn't the first challenger to Twitch's live streaming dominance. Microsoft's Mixer platform made headlines in 2019 by signing Tyler "Ninja" Blevins to a deal worth around $30 million. Less than a year later, Microsoft ended the service and struck a deal to move its users to the newly launched Facebook Gaming mobile app, which offered creators 100% of subscription revenue as a gateway. Aiming to cut it down to 70. % Two years later. Meta eventually gave up and shut down the app last October when market share fell to 5 percent.
"You can say whatever you want in my chat," Kik creator Adin Ross told viewers, adding: "No Terms of Service."
And Google has made its most competitive push yet into the streaming space, capturing more than 23% of the live streaming market in the last quarter of 2020. The platform has closed million-dollar deals for top creators in 2020 and 2021, including Guy "DrDisRespect" Beahm, Tim "TimTheTatMan" Betar and Rachell "Valkyrae" Hofstetter, to stream exclusively on YouTube.
But in the third quarter of 2022, YouTube only held 16.2% of the market, and viewing hours fell to 40% year-over-year. The lack of additional acquisitions or new features for more than a year suggests that Google may be underinvesting.
Kik is now trying to build a sustainable business where three of the world's biggest tech companies, Microsoft, Meta and Google, have tried and failed, and it's doing so without the benefit of Microsoft's cloud service infrastructure. Facebook is the industry leader in online sales or the Google Video hosting experience. Twitch never turned a profit before or after it was bought by Amazon in 2014.
"The state-owned companies we compete with are at a disadvantage in dealing with shareholders whose main goal is short-term profit," Tehran said.
In a recent broadcast interview, Craven said he believes he can reduce operating costs by not hiring more employees. Kik leases technology from Amazon Web Services originally developed by Twitch and uses Stripe to process payments. Craven has introduced AI tools that help scale, while Twitch has a trust and security team of more than 200 people.
Whether that kind of infrastructure and investment will be enough to curb Kik's reputation for offensive content, including nudity and gambling, is an open question for advertisers. In the early days of the stage, moderation was almost non-existent. Adin Ross, who joined Kik after he was finally banned from Twitch for using "offensive or hateful symbols," has become the platform's most popular streamer, having streamed adult videos, copyrighted movies, and, at one point, the Super Bowl became irrelevant. . "There are no terms of service," Ross told viewers, "you can say whatever you want in my chat." Another broadcaster was banned for a day after performing oral sex live on camera.
Kik has since made efforts to clean up its product and fight abuse in its chat communities, but has signed self-proclaimed gambling addicts xQc and Amoranz, who have built world-famous solo fans. Do a little for him. Exempts vulnerable advertisers. During xQc's first Kick broadcast , he was live-streaming The Dark Knight until an employee entered the chat to tell him to turn it off. However, no further steps were taken.
"My Kick streams will be very unfiltered," said recent Kick signee Hamudi "Yasuo" Abdelhman on his new Twitch stream. His debut included swiping on Tinder, video chatting on Omegle, and gambling on Stake, all activities banned on Twitch.
Kik's long-term viability as a company is of secondary importance to many creators, who often think of their careers as short and volatile. Like the golfers who left the PGA Tour last year to join Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf with eight- and nine-figure contracts, if there was more money, most would support the removal of the brand. More difficult.
"It's understandable," said popular Twitch streamer Hassan "Hasan Abi" Pyker. “At the end of the day, you want to make money, you want to survive, I don't blame them for that. Our financial success is always on shaky ground, so most content creators are trying to make it as high as possible."
Thanks to the stability of Kick's permanent contract, "a lot of the stress is finally gone," Amorant says. He believes Kik streamers won't be upset if the subscription part changes because the company is responsible and cooperative in all aspects of the platform.
"The producers are part of the [Kick] team and help manage it," Amorant says.