The End of the Illusion: Kick Is Drowning in Bots, and Management Doesn’t Know What to Do

The End of the Illusion: Kick Is Drowning in Bots, and Management Doesn’t Know What to Do

A huge portion of the audience on the rapidly growing streaming platform Kick has turned out to be pure fiction. This shocking truth was revealed not by some random hater, but by Ed Craven himself—the co-founder of the service. The scale of the disaster is staggering: for example, on streams by former FaZe Clan esports players, the share of “dead souls” among viewers can reach an insane 90%

Analytical agencies Streams Charts and Stream Hatchet are sounding the alarm, noting that the situation fully spiraled out of control as early as last year. In just one quarter of 2025, the number of profiles caught engaging in blatant viewbotting surged by 164%, from 7.7 thousand to 20.3 thousand. The trend looks terrifying:

• Early 2025: around 1,000 obvious “viewbotters” were detected each month.

• Second quarter of 2025: the number tripled and broke the 3,000-account mark.

• Current situation: every sixth content creator on the platform with more than 50 concurrent viewers uses artificial boosting.

Overall, bots accounted for a horrifying 68.7% of Kick’s total traffic in 2025. This means that more than half of those contributing to viewership statistics are simply neural-network algorithms. Artificial viewer inflation is most common in the platform’s most popular category, Just Chatting, with the casino and gambling category taking an honorable second place.

The biggest problem is that the platform’s administration is currently powerless. Not a single streamer is willing to voluntarily admit to buying viewers, and the platform lacks effective tools for automated cleanup, something Craven himself openly acknowledges. If the “green Twitch competitor” fails to find a way to get rid of the bot invasion in the near future, the high-profile project risks collapsing spectacularly and fading into shameful obscurity.