Twitch Streamer Adin Ross Banned After Moving to Rival Platform Kick
For nearly a decade, Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., has remained the dominant platform for video game livestreaming despite the efforts of competing services such as Facebook Gaming by Meta Platforms, Inc., TikTok Live, Microsoft Corp.’s defunct Mixer, and YouTube Gaming, which has lured top personalities away from Twitch with lucrative deals.
Nevertheless, Twitch has maintained its stronghold, with 2.6 million viewers currently tuned in to 92,200 livestreams. Until recently, Adin Ross, a 22-year-old streamer known for his NBA 2K and Grand Theft Auto V content, was one of those streamers, boasting a following of 7.2 million. However, he decided to switch to Kick, Twitch’s latest rival, which launched late last year and appeals more to Ross’s unconventional persona. Kick has been gradually attracting Twitch streamers who are dissatisfied with the platform’s policies.
Related: The evolution of Twitch: Is Twitch becoming a pressroom?
During a recent interview with journalist Jake Lucky, Ross expressed his belief that Twitch has been making poor decisions, citing the platform’s contentious revenue sharing model and insistence that streamers run more advertisements. Ross stated that this is an opportune moment for Kick to enter the market and offer Twitch some healthy competition.
Kick’s advertising boasts a revenue sharing model of 95-5, as compared to Twitch’s default 50-50 split. While Ross claims to have received a substantial sum for his contract with Kick, he indicates that financial gain was not his sole motivation for switching platforms. Ross expressed his desire to speak his mind freely without restriction, something he felt was not possible on Twitch. Ross has livestreamed a range of content on Kick, including showing the Super Bowl, browsing Pornhub, and even featuring a discussion with a Nazi about their views.
Unlike Kick, Twitch has more stringent moderation measures in place to uphold its community guidelines that prohibit hateful conduct, harassment, sexual content, and copyright infringement. Additionally, Ross was no longer able to livestream his cryptocurrency gambling activities on Twitch after it was banned on the platform in late 2022.
Recently, Twitch banned Ross’s account due to violations of its policies against unmoderated hateful conduct in chat, including racist and anti-Semitic messages.
According to a spokesperson for Kick, the platform is actively working to expand its moderation efforts and improve its policies on a daily basis. The spokesperson also stated that Kick adheres to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests and has a zero-tolerance policy towards hate speech.
However, Kick’s ownership structure remains unclear. The platform is being publicly promoted by Tyler Niknam, a prominent Twitch streamer known as Trainwreck. It has been reported that crypto gambling website Stake.com’s co-owners, Eddie Craven and Bijan Tehrani, have invested an undisclosed sum in Kick. Presently, Kick has approximately 30,000 viewers who are watching streamers play casino games, including on Stake.
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