Twitch is by far the biggest name in the world of live streaming, but it faces competition from Kick, whose strategy has involved paying large sums of money to popular streamers to exclusively use its platform.
Amazon-owned Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a recent interview that he believes Kick is making a “complete mistake” by poaching streamers for exclusivity deals.
Although Clancy believes Twitch is “without a doubt the best platform,” Kick has been able to sign big names like xQc, Adin Ross, and Amouranth to multimillion-dollar deals.
In the interview with live streamer NateGentile7, Clancy stated that he believes other platforms should focus on encouraging new faces to stream rather than simply moving existing stars from one place to another.
“We need live streaming to grow”
“You know, TikTok doesn’t try to attract our streamers, they go and try to get new people to stream,” the CEO continued, “I think it’s a complete mistake to say, ‘Oh, the live streaming market is fixed, I just I’m going to try to get what the other one has.
“And then as soon as (Kick) stops paying them, they’ll be right back. That happened with Mixer, that happened with YouTube. “They paid them and then they came back.”
Live streamer Ninja signed a deal to stream on Mixer, the Microsoft-owned platform exclusively, but returned to Twitch when Mixer shut down in 2020.
Clancy said that instead of worrying about other platforms and attracting streamers to Twitch, his focus was on adding and improving features on Twitch to help streamers already there. In May they added a new discovery feed with vertically aligned clips that mimic TikTok or YouTube shorts. This allows viewers to preview channels without watching pre-video ads and not knowing if they will enjoy the content.
Featured Image Credit: Twitch
