Twitch CEO Daniel Clancy doubled down on the platform’s stance against promotion of unregulated gambling services in a May 31 interview.
Clancy said that offshore unregulated services have a lack of transparency that imply companies can tweak odds however they want to benefit themselves.
“There’s a reason that you [need] a VPN do to it from most major countries,” Daniel Clancy said in the interview with Twitch streamer Filian. “The amount of money that was flowing where our creators were building the connections they formed on Twitch to drive people to these sites, it was a significant amount of money to a small number of creators and we didn’t think it was good for the community.”
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In October 2022, Twitch banned streaming gambling from unregulated websites and restricted the promotion of other gambling services following a strong rise in audience numbers that stirred controversy and led to high-profile streamers taking firm stances on the matter.
Since then, gambling websites have found another Amazon-owned streaming platform to promote their services: Kick. Launched in March, the streaming platform startup features looser restrictions on gambling and pretty much everything else as well.
As a result, more and more streamers are switching to Kick so they can get more freedom on the matter. At the time of writing, Kick’s Slots & Casino category tops the platform in terms of audience.
It roughly matches the number of simultaneous viewers in Twitch’s Virtual Casino category despite a being a significantly smaller site. Since Kick is a rather new platform, it’s likely those numbers are going to grow over time and surpass those of Twitch.
