Kick just had its best month ever, and it’s putting the pieces in place to ensure its growth continues into the future. After reporting 317 million hours of watch time during March 2025, Kick is increasing its investments in fields like monetization and moderation, according to Co-Founder Ed Craven.
Craven co-founded Kick backer Stake.com alongside Bijan Tehrani. Since taking over as the CEO of Kick, Craven has invested heavily in streamer infrastructure to make the platform a legitimate rival for established industry leader Twitch.
The latest data coming out of Kick HQ shows how that effort is going. A spokesperson for the platform told Digiday that Kick now has more than 57 million total users. In addition to the unprecedented watch time figure, Kick also bested its average watch time record in March with 443,559 concurrent viewers.
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To compare those numbers against Twitch’s returns, we can turn to StreamElements and its data partner Rainmaker.gg. During the shorter month of February, Twitch earned more than 1.5 billion hours of watch time, according to StreamElements’ latest State of the Streams report.
Though initially known for splashy signings, Kick has encouraged long-term growth by supporting the middle class of streamers. Initiatives like the Kick Road campaign, which offers a $50,000 prize pool to creators with low viewership rates, are part of Kick’s plan to carry out that vision.
Supporting small creators is nice, but Kick also faces high-profile roadblocks related to controversial behaviors within its community. The Stake.com venture has platformed controversial figures like Adin Ross, giving it a reputation as a breeding ground for conservative politics.
To address the potential issues that could be caused by contentious streamers, Kick is ratcheting up its moderation. “Kick has invested at least tenfold, compared to what we used to, in moderation,” Craven told Digiday. “It’s become one of our frontrunners, in terms of where we put resourcing. Trust and Safety, especially, has become one of our larger departments internally. So, it’s continuously growing.”
The give-and-take between viewership and moderation will be an important balancing act for Kick moving forward. Adding to its traffic numbers can potentially put it in the same stratosphere as Twitch, but as its community grows, scaling moderation becomes a difficult question to answer — just ask YouTube.
