The streaming startup Kick has received a lot of attention lately with Twitch streamer Adin Ross flirting with a move to the platform, but Ludwig thinks Ross’ association with the platform might be doing more harm than good.
Promising extraordinarily high profit splits for content creators, many have questioned the long-term business model for Kick, and Ludwig is certainly one of those people.
“What’s their business plan to last?” he said.
With the platform seeming to work with creators like Trainwreck and Adin Ross, Ludwig expressed curiosity about how the platform planned to avoid ending up like the now-defunct Microsoft streaming platform Mixer, which notably signed top streamers Ninja and Shroud to exclusive contracts before going out of business.
Early in the platform’s life, Kick has drawn criticism for its general lack of content moderation that has led to instances of creators broadcasting things that are against the platform’s Terms of Service. It even led to Ross emphatically claiming that the platform didn’t even have Terms of Service.
Related: Adin Ross showed porn on stream, but did he break the law?
Comparing Kick’s current state to the early years of Twitch, Ludwig said that the established streaming behemoth eventually had to crack down on questionable behavior on the platform in the interest of becoming profitable.
In order to generate revenue, the platform needed to be able to attract advertising money, and that wasn’t possible with the website being in a “wild west”-like state.
“Advertisers want everyone to be buttoned-up versions of … me or fucking Sykkuno,” he said. “I mean, they want some fucking goody two-shoes losers.”
In Ludwig’s opinion, Ross and Train doing things like live streaming a broadcast of the Super Bowl without a license on the platform “jeopardizes” hopes of the platform having legitimate success.
While the platform’s potential for success has always appeared to be an uphill battle, Ludwig pointed out that Kick has a strong potential to at least “shake things up” if it manages to pull some creators away from Twitch, the same way that Mixer did in 2019.
“It would get Twitch’s ass to start giving everybody they can a deal so they don’t leave,” he said. “YouTube would probably have to get in the game.”
Related: The main differences between Twitch’s and Kick’s guidelines
For now, it appears as though Ludwig is still suspicious of Kick’s true intentions as a business, given its association with online casino Stake’s ownership.
“Maybe I’m a loony conspiracist,” he said. “But maybe they want the gambling streamers to be the actual cash cow and then Adin would be a loss leader who brings people in, and then they get interested in gambling and that’s where Stake.com makes most of their money anyway. So it’s basically a marketing tool for Stake.”
Ludwig is certainly not the only person to float the idea, and given who the first promoters of the platform are, it’s a completely reasonable theory. It’s likely no coincidence that Ross and Trainwreck were among the content creators that did the most sponsored gambling on Twitch prior to Stake being banned on the platform.
