Kick is an upstart livestreaming platform that has its sights set on usurping Twitch. To this end, the new company is offering a never-before-seen revenue split for creators of 95–5; a huge gain for streamers on Twitch, who currently have a 50–50 revenue split with the platform.
It has leveraged this to start wooing high-profile streamers with huge deals to get them to switch, including Twitch’s most popular female streamer, Amouranth.
Who is Amouranth?
Amouranth is a 29-year-old internet celebrity, most well known for being a Twitch streamer and OnlyFans content creator. She has a long history with Twitch, having been on the platform since 2016. By 2021, she became the platform’s most popular female content creator, garnering attention for her ASMR and NSFW hot tub streams.
Why did Amouranth move to Kick?
The streamer initially expressed willingness to switch platforms back in March, though she noted any deal with Kick would have to be non-exclusive for her to agree. Beyond that, Amouranth was concerned about the ownership behind Kick. While streamer Trainwreck is a co-founder of the company, it also received investments from Stake, a crypto casino company run by Ed Craven. Many professionals in the Twitch community were skeptical of Kick because of this connection, including Amouranth.
She also feared an exclusive deal with Kick would cost her the huge community she has cultivated on Twitch, and make it easier for Amazon to ban her on Twitch.
Months later, on June 6, Twitch announced a new set of branded content guidelines that were immediately met with backlash. These guidelines included restrictions on the kinds of sponsored content streamers were allowed to do on Twitch, including limitations on brand signage and completely prohibiting certain types of branding. The streaming platform immediately walked these guidelines back, but they seem to be the last straw for Amouranth.
“Twitch’s ‘sin’ isn’t trying to squeeze their creators,” Amouranth wrote in a June 18 thread on her personal Twitter account. “Their sin is making a business model that doesn’t succeed except maybe at YouTube scale—but live streaming is a much smaller TAM than pre-recorded video (esp when TikTok won the ultra-short form streams).”
“Instead of figuring out a novel/better way to tie into Amazon’s rapidly growing as business (possibly not in Twitch’s control) Twitch decided to squeeze streamers even tho [sic] they will never be able to achieve profitability that way.”
Who has signed with Kick so far?
Recently, Kick has managed to secure some huge stars in the streaming space including Grandmaster chess player Hikaru. On June 16, former Overwatch pro and Twitch’s most popular male streamer xQc signed with Kick on a two-year, $70 million contract—a deal that has a $100 million ceiling should he meet requirements.
Less than 48 hours later, on June 17, Twitch’s most popular female streamer, Amouranth, followed suit, announcing her departure from Twitch during her seventh-anniversary stream with a wry trailer on Twitter.
What does Amouranth’s Kick contract look like?
Amouranth hasn’t shared any details of her Kick contract yet, though it seems likely she will have a non-exclusive agreement similar to xQc’s given her hesitancy to sign exclusively with Kick. There are rumors her contract was worth $30 million, but they seem to have started with a meme account, so their veracity is questionable.
