Kick is \u201cburning money\u201d paying for Twitch\u2019s streaming service from Amazon Unplash: @djravine\/KickNew streaming platform Kick has positioned itself as a direct rival to Twitch, tempting streamers to leave and join them. But a former Amazon engineer argues that Kick is in fact \u201csubsidizing\u201d Twitch by paying Amazon for their streaming service. Kick was launched in coordination with gambling platform Stake and popular Twitch streamer Trainwreck. Although the ownership structure isn\u2019t totally clear, what is clear is that Kick is presenting itself as a better option than Twitch. Kick regularly tweets about their superior sub revenue split, offering 95% to streamers, vs Twitch\u2019s 50%. This has raised some eyebrows about the site\u2019s sustainability, considering the costs required to run the platform. However, some of these costs are actually directly paid to Amazon \u2013 Twitch\u2019s owner. Ex-Twitch engineer explains Kick\u2019s Amazon setup Cyrus Hall worked at Twitch and Amazon for a decade as part of the team that worked on the integration of the platform\u2019s streaming service with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2020. On Twitter, he explained that Kick is \u201csubsidizing Twitch by paying to use the Twitch video system via AWS\u201d \u2013 and that this comes at a significant cost. \u201cI too think IVS is the best video system for this use case, but paying ~8-10x cost is not a sustainable growth plan,\u201d Hall said. Hall speculates that Kick\u2019s current system will be \u201cburning money,\u201d with the eventual goal of switching to their own CDN (content delivery network) when the time is right. This of course raises the question again around the sustainability of Kick, given the 95% subscription revenue split. However, as mentioned, Stake.com is a stakeholder in Kick \u2013 so the ultimate goal may not be generating profit from Kick itself anyway, but rather directing users to the gambling site. Esports veteran Scott \u2018SirScoots\u2019 Smith described Kick\u2019s situation as entirely beneficial to Amazon overall, as if Kick does continue to grow and challenge Twitch, \u201cso will the checks they have to write to Amazon.\u201d And Kick has been growing rapidly. According to SimilarWeb, Kick.com received 58 million visits in March \u2013 up from only 13 million in January and 29 million in February. Twitch, for comparison, averages around 1 billion visits per month, so there is still a chasm between the two live streaming platforms. Either way, Amazon stands to benefit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kick is \u201cburning money\u201d paying for Twitch\u2019s streaming service from Amazon Unplash: @djravine\/KickNew streaming platform Kick has positioned itself as a direct rival to Twitch, tempting streamers to leave and join them. But a former Amazon engineer argues that Kick is in fact \u201csubsidizing\u201d Twitch by paying Amazon for their streaming service. Kick was launched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}