Offline
The short version: a new platform paid better, a lot of big names tried it, and the rules later changed so they didn't have to choose. The practical result for viewers is that the person you follow may be live in two places at once.
Measured, not claimed
Over the last 26 days Kick has had 28% of the viewers across the top 100 live channels on each platform, Twitch 72%, and we have seen 88 channels live on both in the last 30 days. See Kick vs Twitch, with the streamers on both.
Kick launched at the end of 2022 and led with a single, very legible pitch: a 95/5 revenue split in the streamer's favour, against the 50/50 that had long been standard for most Twitch partners. Whatever else is arguable about the platform, that number did the recruiting. For a mid-sized streamer it is the difference between subscription income being a side effect and being a salary.
Kick paired it with guaranteed contracts for established names. That is the part that made headlines — a handful of very large channels announcing they were moving — but the more durable effect was further down the ladder, where the split alone was reason enough to start a second channel.
For years Twitch's contracts discouraged broadcasting the same stream anywhere else, so going to Kick effectively meant leaving. In 2024 Twitch relaxed those terms and allowed simulcasting to other platforms. The economics of the decision changed overnight: a streamer no longer had to pick a side, they could run both and let the audience sort itself out.
So the "migration" framing is now mostly out of date. A more accurate description of the current landscape is that a large number of streamers maintain a presence on both, with the audience, the chat culture, and sometimes the content differing between them. How that audience actually splits between the two is measured here every day, by category and by hour, on Kick vs Twitch.
What this means if you watch: following someone across the split is no longer a matter of picking the right platform. It is a matter of having both open. That is the entire reason this site exists.
A channel that simulcasts is genuinely two streams: two chats, two sets of emotes, two communities reacting to the same moment in different registers. Plenty of viewers want the Kick chat and the Twitch video, or want to keep one in the corner while the other has focus.
There is no account to create and nothing to install — the channel list lives in your own browser, and you can export it if you want to move it somewhere else.
Most coverage of this shift is about personalities: who signed what, who fell out with whom, who got banned and came back. That is genuinely the most-read part of the story and it is also the part that ages fastest and gets reported least carefully. This page deliberately sticks to the structural changes — the revenue split, the simulcasting rules — because those are what actually changed how you watch, and they are still true a year later.
Last reviewed: September 2026.