He’s been dangling the idea in front of his audience for weeks, but yesterday, Adin Ross released a video emulating LeBron James’ “The Decision” from 2010 when the all-time great basketball player famously said he was taking his talents to South Beach.
In the parody video, Ross repeatedly gets interrupted in a humorous fashion, making him unable to tell fans where he is going to be streaming. But the end of the video cuts to a clear promotion of his channel on the streaming startup platform Kick, which is still in open beta.
So it seems clear then, right? Ross is leaving Twitch and headed to Kick to stream exclusively on the platform. Or is he?
While his video would have you believe Ross is no longer going to stream on Twitch, a few pieces of evidence suggest that he isn’t necessarily leaving the platform high and dry.
Firstly, when Kick was brought to the public’s attention by Trainwreck in December, the creator made it clear that his partnership with Kick did not include exclusivity. And why would it?
By continuing to stream on Twitch, Train was able to promote Kick in plain sight while still maintaining his status as a Twitch partner. There’s no incentive for Kick to force exclusivity out of a creator. In fact, having a high-profile streamer talk about Kick on another platform like Twitch is the best possible marketing the startup could ask for.
Meanwhile, there are other breadcrumbs that make it clear Ross isn’t completely done with Twitch. Having streamed on Twitch as recently as 14 hours ago, Ross is also still a Partnered streamer on the established streaming giant.
Related: Adin Ross showed porn on stream, but did he break the law?
In the past two weeks, Ross has continually streamed for a little bit less than an hour on Twitch every couple of days to get viewers on his channel and redirect them to a stream on Kick. So he may be prioritizing Kick streams at the moment, but make no mistake about it, his move isn’t anything like what we’ve seen out of high-profile moves to places like YouTube, Facebook, or Mixer.
Even on his YouTube channel, his most recent video is an 18-minute clip from a Twitch stream, not a Kick broadcast. The video, which was uploaded four hours after the parody of “The Decision,” did include a small Kick logo in the upper left portion of the screen, but its description had some conflicting promotional material as well. The text reads “IM LIVE EVERY DAY” with a link to the creator’s Twitch channel, again, not Kick.
It can be extremely difficult to navigate the business of online personalities. Deception is often afoot, and what people don’t say is regularly more important than whatever they’re talking about.
Related: The main differences between Twitch’s and Kick’s guidelines
So far, everything that Ross has engaged in since bringing up Kick has been a part of the marketing for the new platform. From his erratic behavior to his waffling back and forth about whether he’ll join the platform formally or not, it all creates discourse that brings more attention to the platform.
In many ways, his content over the past few weeks, including that on Twitch, has done much more to promote Kick than any buzz he would have generated if he had simply said he was moving to Kick exclusively and stopped his Twitch streams. In all likelihood, a more traditional approach like that would have seen him fade into irrelevance fairly quickly, losing a large portion of his viewer base.
Has Adin Ross left Twitch for good? He certainly hasn’t closed the door on himself, and it doesn’t seem like Twitch is hardballing him into stopping the promotion of a potential competitor. So don’t be surprised if most of Ross’ recent antics are just a play for some quick advertising dollars.
Update Feb. 28 12:38pm CT: After this article was published, Ross was banned from Twitch in what he claimed to be an indefinite suspension. When asked for comment on the ban, a Twitch spokesperson told Dot Esports over the weekend that “per our Community Guidelines, unmoderated Hateful Conduct in chat, such as racist and anti-semitic messages, is not allowed on Twitch.”
Following the ban, Ross admitted that his goal with his short Twitch streams was indeed simply to attract viewers to his Kick channel, where the bulk of his live content took place. He has also claimed that his deal with Kick is worth millions of dollars and includes an equity stake in the platform, despite not requiring exclusivity.
