Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000189 · Apps & Platforms → Dead platforms → Streaming platforms · 2022–2025
Kick (service)
Australian livestreaming site built on looser moderation and casino money
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“A casino company built a Twitch rival, and slots streams had somewhere to go.”
Why Noah kept it
Kick is the streaming site Stake's owners launched in December 2022, weeks after Twitch banned slots streams, then paid xQc and Adin Ross to move over. Twitch is in the Ark, but nothing covers gambling money funding a rival with looser rules.
- In the Ark since
- 28 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 13.0 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 37.0 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_(service)
What it is
Kick was an Australian livestreaming platform launched in 2022 by casino operator Stake and streamer Trainwreckstv as a direct competitor to Twitch. It lured high-profile streamers with revenue-sharing deals and drew attention for permitting gambling streams and less aggressive content moderation than Twitch. By 2025 it had become the fourth most-watched livestreaming platform globally.
Why it’s internet culture
Kick shows how platforms can be built specifically to undercut an established competitor's rules and how streamers will migrate for better pay, but also what happens when a business model depends on tolerating content that other platforms have banned: harassment, sexual material, and illegal activity happened openly on Kick, and in August 2025 a streamer died during a live broadcast on the platform.
Streamers followed the money to a casino-backed site with looser rules, and audiences rewarded shock content there. That ran from gambling streams to set-up stunts and, in 2025, a streamer's death on air.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2022 · Kick.com, set up in Australia by the owners of the online casino Stake (Easygo) · Also known as Kick.com; Kick Streaming Pty Ltd
- What it is
- Kick is a website where people broadcast live video of themselves to an audience that watches and types messages in a chat box beside it. These broadcasters, called streamers, play video games, gamble, chat or walk around cities filming whatever happens. Viewers pay them through monthly subscriptions and tips. Kick is owned by the people who run Stake, an online casino that takes cryptocurrency, and it allows gambling broadcasts that its main rival, Twitch, had banned.
- Where it came from
- In September 2022 Twitch, then the biggest live streaming site, said it would ban streams of unlicensed slots, roulette and dice sites from October. Stake had been paying many Twitch streamers to gamble on air. Kick opened in December 2022, set up by Stake's founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, with the streamer Trainwreckstv as a backer. It offered streamers 95 per cent of subscription money, far more than Twitch's usual 50 per cent. In 2023 Adin Ross moved over after a Twitch ban, and xQc signed a deal reported at around $70 million.
- Why it mattered
- It showed a Twitch rival could be built quickly if someone paid streamers enough, and here the money came from gambling. By 2025 the analytics firm Streams Charts ranked it fourth for hours watched among the sites it tracked, behind YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. Its looser rules also produced its worst moments. In 2023 Ice Poseidon and Sam Pepper were detained in Australia after streaming a sex worker who didn't know she was live. In August 2025 the French streamer Jean Pormanove died during a Kick broadcast after repeated on-air abuse by his co-streamers, and French authorities opened an investigation.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- Streamers went where the money was, and here the money came from a casino. Audiences then watched whatever was most extreme, and Kick's own CEO said on record that more shock meant more viewers.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.5 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (13.4 KB)
- Original
- 37.0 KB
- Ark cost
- 13.0 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.4 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.5 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 35.0% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,484 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,059 |
History
Kept
“Kick is the streaming site Stake's owners launched in December 2022, weeks after Twitch banned slots streams, then paid xQc and Adin Ross to move over. Twitch is in the Ark, but nothing covers gambling money funding a rival with looser rules.”