A Billion to nowhere? Kick recognised its app as "garbage" and is preparing radical changes
Streaming platform Kick has reached an impressive milestone of 100 million users, but behind the beautiful figure there are serious systemic problems. The co-founder of the service, Bijan Tehrani, was extremely frank in his recent statement: he called the current application "literally trash" and admitted that the technical base of the project remained extremely weak until recently.
Reconstruction for a billion and the advent of advertising
A colossal budget of $1 billion has already been spent on the development of Kick, but it was not enough. Now the platform is planned to be rewritten almost from scratch. The global redesign of the software will require new huge investments, which forces the management to change the financial policy. To recoup the costs, advertising will appear on Kick in the near future. Tehrani promises that it will be "unobtrusive", but the very fact of its appearance causes scepticism among the audience. accustomed to freedom from marketing.
Affiliate Purges and Double Standards
In recent months, Kick has begun to actively "tighten the screws". Thousands of accounts have been excluded from the affiliate program. The official reason is the fight against abuse and cheating of indicators. However, users note the selectivity of moderation:
- Small streamers fall under the distribution and receive bans at the first request of regulators.
- Big influencers often continue to break the rules without any consequences, remaining untouchable to the system.
The end of the era of casinos for the CIS?
One of the main problems for the Russian-speaking segment was the actual ban on gambling broadcasts (casinos) in Russian. Given that the lion's share of the audience switched from Twitch to Kick precisely for the sake of this content, the platform risks losing a significant part of loyal users. Without a "kazik", the Kick for many turns into a pale copy of competitors, deprived of its main (albeit controversial) advantage.