After hearing rumors on the internets about xQc allegedly signing a seventy million dollar contract with Kick, this immediately brought to mind the time Microsoft had signed exclusive deals with Ninja and Shroud for their streaming platform Mixer. Rest in peace Mixer. I actually liked streaming on Mixer as a side note!
The question that was plaguing my mind was this, would xQc bringing over a massive audience increase the overall health of the ecosystem in Kick? Unfortunately for Mixer, signing Ninja and Shroud was not enough to breathe life into their platform because while they both did bring a large audience with them, that audience left as soon as Ninja and Shroud went offline. The viewers did not bother to stream on the platform or look for other streamers.
So I went digging into the analytics of Kick to find out what kind of impact xQc had on the site. However, as I was browsing through the list of top streamers of the week, I noticed something quite strange. Most of the list was populated by the same profile picture and similar channel names revolving around money, events, and charity.
These streams had peak viewers in the tens of thousands and only lasted anywhere from five to twenty five minutes. It’s the most probable scenario that these streams are crypto related scams that are view botted. Thankfully Kick manages to catch and ban these channels in a few minutes time. I saw one of these channels live and tried to click on it but it was banned by the time I noticed it was live.
I will definitely keep an eye out and try to enter one of these scam streams to see how they operate.
These streams reminded me of the crypto scam live streams often found on YouTube. These scammers hijack legitimate YouTube channels by posing as fake companies offering a potential sponsorship via an infected PDF file. Once you open the PDF fie, it will run an exploit that will copy your session tokens and send them to the scammers. With the session tokens, they have enough control over the YouTube channel to quickly change it to appear as an official Tesla YouTube channel. They then feature a prerecorded clip of usually Elon Musk talking about crypto. The live chat will then link to a scam website offering to double any crypto you send to the wallet. Obviously you get nothing back.
This is pretty interesting as Kick is trying to grow and pass itself off as a legitimate operation. I personally don’t think these bot streams will impact Kick too negatively as most platforms are infested with bots in one way shape or form.
As for whether or not signing xQc, and more recently Amouranth as well, will have a positive impact on the platform, only time will tell. There does seem to be a noticeable uptick in both people watching and streaming on the platform but it’s a bit hard to tell due to the bot streams messing with the analytics.
Ducky Obrien 