Two advantages almost no new livestreaming platform gets were sitting behind Kick when it launched in late 2022. Its founders had billions of dollars available, and they had just learned firsthand what happens when somebody else controls a marketing channel you depend on. Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani had built Stake into one of the world’s largest crypto gambling companies by reaching customers through streamers, sports sponsorships, affiliates, celebrities, and crypto communities. What Kick added was the one thing gambling companies normally rent from Google, Meta, broadcasters, affiliates, or influencers: distribution they owned outright.
Calling it a casino-streaming side project four years later is considerably harder. Kick says it now has over 100 million active users and logged more than 1.5 billion hours watched in Q2 2026, while Stream Hatchet independently put Q1 watch time at 1.27 billion hours, a 65.35% year-over-year increase. Riot Games and ESL FACEIT Group run major esports broadcasts through the service, and August 2026 brought large-scale advertising to its livestreams. Gambling hasn’t gone anywhere, though it now occupies one corner of a much larger media business.
Oct. 18, 2022 was the deadline Twitch set for its ban on streams of slots, roulette, and dice games from gambling websites it considered insufficiently regulated. The announcement had come in September, and Stake was named in it directly, alongside Rollbit, Duelbits, and Roobet. Twitch’s rules still prohibit streaming Stake, linking to it, or showing its branding today, while sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker survive under separate conditions.
By that point, Twitch personalities had become a serious customer-acquisition channel for Stake. Some creators were being paid $1 million a month or more to gamble on stream, according to Forbes, during a period when Stake’s gross gaming revenue went from roughly $100 million in 2020 to more than $2 billion in 2022. Craven has credited the pandemic-era livestreaming boom for accelerating that, and the growth continued afterward, hitting $4.7 billion in gross revenue by 2024.
A Twitch competitor had apparently been on Craven and Tehrani’s minds before any of this, but the ban turned an idea into a priority. Kick reached beta within months, running close to the inverse of Twitch’s proposition: gambling allowed, 95% of subscription revenue to creators, exclusivity largely dropped. The lesson Twitch had just delivered was that Stake could spend enormous sums building an audience somewhere and lose access to it through one policy change. Owning the platform outright took that particular risk off the table.
Easygo now presents Stake and Kick as products in one business ecosystem, alongside its game-development operations, and its website claims more than 160 million users across the group. Stake accounts for over 20 million active users and $30 billion in monthly wagers by that count, with Kick contributing more than 500 million monthly hours watched. Company figures rather than audited data, obviously, though the relationship they describe is hardly ambiguous when both businesses share the same founders.
The resources behind that group show up in Australian financial accounts. Easygo Group Holdings reported A$970 million in revenue, A$257 million in net profit, and A$5.07 billion in net assets for the year ending June 30, 2025, with 636 employees at the Australian entity, A$118 million in wages, and A$70 million spent on IT. Neither Kick’s standalone accounts nor all of Stake’s global gambling revenue appear in those numbers, but they do explain how a streaming service could spend like an established platform years before building an established platform’s revenue model.
Relevance, in Kick’s case, was something you could buy. A two-year non-exclusive contract took Félix “xQc” Lengyel to the platform in 2023, worth $70 million guaranteed and up to $100 million with incentives. Forbes put Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa’s deal at around $7 million annually and later reported $10 million over one year for Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff. No startup funded by subscription commissions signs contracts at that scale. A streaming service whose founders were running a casino business generating billions could tolerate the losses.
Creator payouts followed the same reasoning. Of the $5 Kick charges for a subscription, $4.75 goes to the creator and 25 cents stays behind as a processing fee, with the same 95% share applying to KICKs and Gifts. Partner Program streamers can qualify for additional payments based on their broadcasts, and multistreaming to competing services is still permitted, though Partner Program payouts fall by 50% while a creator broadcasts to another long-form platform.
Underneath all of it was a decision to treat creators as the supply side of a marketplace that needed filling, not as customers to squeeze margin from. Recognizable names came from the big contracts, the 95/5 split gave smaller streamers an economic reason to experiment, and non-exclusivity meant experimenting cost them nothing. Nobody had to move an audience overnight; a Twitch creator could run Kick alongside their existing channel and watch whether viewers followed.
Kick’s first-year audience has been left well behind, at least according to independent viewing data. Stream Hatchet measured 1.27 billion hours watched in Q1 2026, up from 770.4 million in the same quarter of 2025, with hours streamed rising nearly 70% year over year. Twitch still dwarfs that at 4.55 billion hours for the quarter, so the market leader remains the market leader, though Kick is no longer competing as a marginal alternative.
Streams Charts recorded 570.7 million hours watched in June 2026, with 806,800 average concurrent viewers and a peak of 1.85 million. Just Chatting and IRL content drove most of it, while a promotion around Rust pushed the game into the platform’s five most-watched categories that month. The same firm flagged unusual audience patterns around some large channels and advised caution when reading individual creator numbers, which matters more now that Kick’s marketing leans so heavily on overall scale.
English-language gambling personalities carried the platform early on, and the geographic mix has moved a long way since. Forbes Australia noted strong expansion into Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa during Kick’s second year, and Riot later pointed to LATAM, MENA, and Europe as regions where the platform already had substantial esports communities. Regional creators gave Kick somewhere to grow after the expensive-Twitch-star strategy, especially in markets where the biggest Western services had shallower roots.
Seven of the 10 largest casino-focused Kick creators by follower count are associated with Stake, including the two biggest channels, according to Tanzanite data published by The Business of iGaming on Aug. 13. Those seven accounts held more than 500,000 followers between them, while Gamdom, Duelbits, and Chips filled the remaining three spots.
What follower counts can’t reveal is how many of those viewers register with Stake, how much they deposit, or whether sponsoring any given creator pays for itself, and neither company publishes conversion data. The arrangement still hands Craven and Tehrani far more control than a casino buying an affiliate placement gets, because Stake sponsors creators on a platform developed inside its own group, while Kick collects revenue from gambling brands already willing to spend heavily on those audiences.
Search-based affiliate acquisition works on people who already want to gamble; someone typing “best online casino” into Google has announced their intent, and the affiliate collects existing demand. A viewer opening Kick to watch a creator has announced nothing. Casino streams put the operator inside entertainment that viewer already consumes, generating familiarity before any registration funnel begins. Stake had been exploiting that difference on Twitch years before Kick existed, and owning a platform keeps the tactic available no matter how competitors rewrite their policies.
Formal rules around the content have tightened as the platform has grown. Creators must follow gambling laws in their jurisdiction, viewer-funded gambling and gambling by minors are prohibited, gambling broadcasts require age labels, sponsored casino content is permitted only from operators licensed in the relevant jurisdiction, and affiliate relationships have to be disclosed. Keeping gambling rather than removing it the way Twitch did leaves Kick managing licensing differences across dozens of markets.
More than three years of prioritizing audience and creator growth ended in August 2026, when Kick launched its broader advertising proposition. The platform had passed 100 million active users and 1.5 billion hours watched during Q2 by the company’s account, having added 39 million new users in 2025 and another 27 million in the first half of 2026. Kick also puts 81.7% of its audience between 18 and 34, which sells to mainstream advertisers far more easily than a platform known for crypto casino streams would have in 2022.
Unskippable ads now run platform-wide, sparing subscribers on channels they support. Delivery varies by country, language, channel, and content category, and creators get limited options to push back a scheduled break that would land on a significant moment. Brands can exclude categories they don’t want to appear alongside, while gambling advertisers face prior approval, age restrictions, and licensing requirements in every target market.
One question has followed Kick since launch: where does the streaming business eventually make money? Almost nothing stays with the platform under a 95/5 subscription model, and infrastructure, creator payouts, and talent contracts all cost real money. Advertising is the conventional answer. How close it gets Kick to covering its own costs is unknowable from outside, since the company discloses no standalone revenue, EBITDA, or profitability, though Forbes estimated losses exceeding $100 million by 2024, back when Craven and Tehrani were openly choosing growth over profit.
ESL FACEIT Group brought IEM, ESL Pro League, and ESL One to Kick through a long-term April 2026 agreement covering English-language distribution of its major Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 competitions, with Kick and EFG’s own channels becoming the exclusive English-language homes of the ESL Challenger League. IEM Rio marked the start of it, and the whole package arrived without Kick building a single event, league, or competitive audience itself.
Riot Games followed in June, adding Kick to its global distribution network from MSI 2026 onward and covering global and regional League of Legends, VALORANT, and Teamfight Tactics competition outside China and Korea. Viewer drops and incentives work on Kick broadcasts the same way they do for Riot’s other official partners, and creators on the platform can plug into Riot’s wider co-streaming ecosystem.
Individual personalities are a fragile foundation, which is what makes esports rights valuable here. A streamer under a large contract can walk when it expires, fall out of popularity, or quietly move most of their audience elsewhere. An IEM tournament or a League of Legends international delivers a scheduled block of programming with its audience already attached, and co-streaming pushes the same event through numerous creator channels at once. For a platform built by paying creators to bring their communities along, that’s a genuinely different form of distribution.
Looser creator moderation still separates Kick from Twitch, with current guidelines running a context-based enforcement system that weighs intent, involvement, reaction, outcome, and previous conduct. Creators frustrated with Twitch find that appealing. It also means Kick has to decide case by case when provocative or dangerous content has crossed a line, instead of hiding behind broad category bans.
Regulators entered the picture after French streamer Raphaël Graven, known as Jean Pormanove, died in August 2025 following streams in which he had been subjected to repeated violence and humiliation. An autopsy attributed the death to health problems rather than injuries inflicted by the other streamers. Two men received suspended prison sentences in August 2026 for violence and incitement to hatred, and Kick remains under formal investigation in France, where prosecutors have requested arrest warrants involving some company officers.
Mainstream advertising raises what a repeat would cost. Campaigns can exclude gambling, sexual themes, profanity, drugs, and other sensitive categories, yet brand safety was never only about which stream an ad physically appears beside. Large advertisers care about the reputation of the platform carrying their money, so Kick can stay more permissive than Twitch, but each additional dollar of conventional ad revenue makes moderation harder to treat as a pure creator-freedom question.
Infrastructure controlled by other companies is how most gambling operators reach customers. Search rankings and ad rules belong to Google, campaign restrictions to Meta, commercial partnerships to affiliates, sponsorship inventory to sports organizations, and carriage decisions to broadcasters. Stake got the streaming version of that lesson in 2022, when Twitch removed one of its most productive marketing channels.
Kick moved Craven and Tehrani to the other side of that transaction. Creators build audiences on their platform now, esports companies distribute broadcasts through it, advertisers buy access to its viewers, and gambling operators sponsor licensed streams under its rules. Competing for the viewer’s gambling spend hasn’t gotten any easier for Stake, but its founders control a meaningful piece of the environment where that competition happens, and seven of Kick’s 10 biggest casino creators carrying Stake associations shows what the arrangement looks like in practice.
There are limits to the ownership argument, because the rest of the internet’s infrastructure hasn’t gone anywhere. Kick runs on Amazon Web Services, per Forbes, and payment systems, app stores, regulators, advertisers, and game publishers all keep leverage over parts of the operation. Easygo did not become vertically integrated from data center to customer. It removed one specific middleman: another livestreaming company deciding whether Stake and the creators promoting it get to be there.
Serving that strategic purpose doesn’t require every viewer to become a Stake customer. Gaming, IRL broadcasts, esports, and personality-driven entertainment generate advertising and subscription revenue on their own terms while guaranteeing Easygo a large creator ecosystem it isn’t renting from anyone. Casino streams are where Stake benefits most directly, and the more diversified Kick becomes, the less able any outside platform is to recreate the 2022 problem that helped launch it.
Turning those strategic benefits into a sustainable streaming business is the test still ahead. The audience has grown, independent watch-time data broadly supports the direction of Kick’s own numbers, esports organizations treat it as a serious distribution partner, and advertising finally monetizes viewers who never pay a creator. What that audience costs to acquire and maintain stays undisclosed, while moderation and gambling regulation carry risks Twitch has spent years reducing rather than embracing.
Stake spent its early growth years buying attention from streamers, sports properties, affiliates, and celebrities. Craven and Tehrani eventually spent some of the proceeds building a platform that distributes attention itself. Kick may never be worth more than Stake, and its standalone economics remain impossible to judge from public information, but the wider Easygo business now has something most gambling groups don’t: meaningful control over one of the channels where millions of people spend their time online.