Kick announced on April 10, 2026 that it had passed 100 million total users, three years after launching in response to Twitch's October 2022 crackdown on unlicensed gambling content. In an open letter to the community, co-founder Bijan Tehrani called the number "vanity, as we aren't where we need to or should be," admitting the platform rushed to market with weak infrastructure and an app he bluntly said "sucks." Kick has deliberately kept its beta tag as a signal that leadership still considers the product unfinished.
The growth underneath that admission is still real. Kick's hours watched grew 131% in 2025 while Twitch's declined, giving Kick roughly a quarter of the Twitch-vs-Kick livestreaming market, a milestone Tehrani pointed to on social media. The platform logged over 500 million hours watched in March 2026 alone. Some of that growth traces back to Kick's 95/5 subscription revenue split, compared to Twitch's 50/50 default, though the split alone doesn't explain it, the platform's early high-dollar creator contracts pulled in plenty of that first wave too. Funding for all of it has come largely from Stake, the crypto casino Tehrani co-founded with Ed Craven. The pair has personally put nearly $1 billion into Kick to date.
Tehrani's letter also detailed real cleanup work behind the number: thousands of accounts removed from the Kick Partner Program for viewbotting, and tens of millions of fake spam accounts deleted outright. The company is also walking away from the kind of massive flat-fee creator contracts that built its early growth, including xQc's reported $100 million deal from 2023, which Tehrani said generated attention but wasn't financially sustainable. In its place: a new discovery algorithm, already live for about 10% of users, meant to surface real communities instead of just the biggest names already getting the most attention.
