The green Formula 1 car parked on the third floor is the first clue this is no ordinary office. It’s painted in the colours of Stake, an unlicensed online crypto casino that has made billionaires out of two Australian 30-somethings.
Around it, about 1000 people are building Kick, a website that has become one of the biggest names in livestreaming, where people broadcast themselves doing everything from gaming to riding bikes for hours at a time.
The company says it has passed 100 million users in three years and hands the people who stream on it 95¢ of every dollar their fans spend. It also loses money, will not verify most of its figures, and is named in a US lawsuit alleging the casino whose car sits in its foyer runs illegal gambling. (Stake no longer sponsors an F1 team).
The office, on Collins Street in Melbourne, has the feel of a start-up that hasn’t quite noticed how big it has become. The football World Cup plays on the screens next to the company’s internal targets. There are table-tennis tables, a pinball machine and fridges of free beer.
On level four, at a desk no bigger than anyone else’s, sits Ed Craven, the billionaire who co-founded both Kick and the crypto casino Stake, whose logo is on the car downstairs. He is in the building most days, streams to his own audience on Saturdays, and the afternoon this masthead visits he stops to say a brief hello before going back to work.
“I speak to Ed every single day,” says Ethan Wright, director of Kick. “He sits exactly the same as me, at a desk like anyone else.”
Kick was built during the pandemic streaming boom by Craven and his business partner Bijan Tehrani, and it runs on the same appetite for risk that made them rich.
The timing was not incidental. In October 2022, live-streaming platform Twitch, the market leader, owned by the US giant Amazon, banned streams promoting unlicensed gambling sites and named Stake among them, closing off a channel the casino had used to put its product in front of millions of young viewers.
Kick Streaming was registered weeks later and was live by the end of the year. The pitch to creators was simple: where Twitch keeps about half of a streamer’s subscription revenue, Kick keeps 5 per cent and returns the rest. “Everyone was dying for some sort of competition in the market,” says Ryan Webb, the company’s head of growth and revenue, “which is what we wanted to give them.”
Those headline figures are central to Kick’s story and close to impossible to check. The company publishes no audited accounts and no method for its statistics, and the numbers move with the measure. The 100 million users it announced in April is a cumulative tally that Tehrani himself called something of a vanity figure; the audience Wright quotes when pressed is about 10 million a week.
What is harder to wave away is its global spread. Peru’s congress streams its sessions on Kick to reach younger voters; in Saudi Arabia the company claims most of the market.
Its biggest crossover moment belongs to GymSkin, the Essex fitness streamer Jack Smith, who films for Kick and went viral dropping his shoulder to Madonna’s Into the Groove on a night out. It sent the 1985 track back into the UK charts four decades later. Madonna’s team contacted Kick, he says, and weeks later he was livestreaming from inside her London townhouse. “We can put a tagline,” Webb says, only half-joking. “The Melbourne live-stream platform that put Madonna back in the charts.”
Kick’s rise comes as its bigger rivals turn respectable. YouTube has won the global rights to broadcast the Oscars from 2029 and is pushing into late-night television; Twitch has become a venue for mainstream politics and the games industry. Kick’s executives are betting they can walk a tightrope between controversy and community that the others have largely stepped off.
Kick’s rise comes as the platforms it competes with harden into cultural institutions.
That tightrope has a long history of slips. Kick built its early audience on looser moderation than its rivals, and the incidents have stacked up.
In 2023, the streamers Ice Poseidon and Sam Pepper broadcast themselves hiring a sex worker in Brisbane while hiding in an adjoining room; screenshots showed a chat user appearing to be Craven sending laughing emotes as it unfolded, and the episode drove a wave of female creators to ask whether the platform was safe for them.
Last August, mixed martial artist Raja Jackson beat a professional wrestler unconscious on a Kick stream, throwing more than 20 punches at his head before others dragged him off; Jackson was banned and later charged. Gambling, violence and degradation of women have trailed the platform since its launch – the price, its critics say, of an audience built on shock.
That any of it runs out of Melbourne still surprises the people running it. “I’m probably a little bit delusional or obsessive,” Wright says, “but we were going to make this really amazing thing happen out of Melbourne.”
The office is built to keep people in it. Breakfast is served each morning, there are massages on Wednesdays, and on Fridays staff spin a wheel for cash and prizes. New hires are handed platform currency and told to use Kick as part of the job, subscribing and tipping so they know the product they are building. Headcount has swelled from about 100 to about 1000 in four years, and the company has outgrown the tower; this summer it moves to a larger office in Cremorne, an inner-Melbourne tech hub.
The founders give Kick its nerve, and some of its problems. Craven and Tehrani are worth billions on paper, almost all of it through Stake, and they have funnelled the proceeds back into the platform. Tehrani has said the pair put close to $US1 billion (about $1.5 billion) into Kick.
There are no outside shareholders. “We’re founder-led,” Wright says. “We don’t have external stakeholders.”
The company is still unprofitable, and is only now testing the advertising business it hopes will one day cover its costs.
Kick loses money, and a gambling fortune keeps it afloat. Andrei Zanescu, a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal, argued from Kick’s early days that its generosity to creators only made sense as a way of buying customers for Stake, and nothing since has changed his mind.
Twitch still dwarfs it, he tells me, with about 140 million monthly users and close to $US3 billion in disclosed revenue, against a Kick that publishes no earnings at all. By his own count – numbers that the company disputes – Kick draws about 182,000 people watching at any given moment, against Twitch’s 955,000 and YouTube’s 1.4 million.
Its content, gambling along with the violent and the extreme, also makes it a hard sell to big sponsors. On Kick, some of the most-watched content is “slots”: creators gambling on online casino games, many of them Stake’s, live on camera. Put to Wright, the argument draws a precise answer: gambling is the one thing Kick will not pay people to broadcast. “Slots is actually a demonetised category,” he says. “You do not get paid for streaming in it.”
Zanescu calls that rebuttal superficial. Gambling streams are still among the most popular on Kick, he says, and that is the point. Because Twitch and YouTube ban gambling outright, simply allowing it is what pulls gambling fans and streamers to Kick, whether or not the platform ever pays them directly.
“Access is tacit approval,” he says. Until Kick courts the kind of mainstream content that brands and institutions find palatable, he argues, it is hard to see it as anything other than a platform built on gambling and extremity.
Charles Livingstone, who heads the gambling and social determinants unit at Monash University, takes the argument further. A platform does not need to pay anyone to stream slots to push viewers towards a casino that shares its owners. His larger point is that Stake appears to be licensed in Curacao but not in Australia, so it cannot lawfully offer gambling to Australians, and it does not appear under that name on the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s list of blocked sites. “It seems clear the platform is providing customers to the casino,” he says. “It seems senseless otherwise.”
The link between the two companies is the question Kick fields most often. Both sit under Easygo, the group Craven and Tehrani control, and Wright says the businesses are walled off from one another, if not literally. Kick has its own leadership, its own strategy and its own staff, “ringfenced from any other organisation”.
Webb reaches for the obvious comparison. “Amazon’s a good example, where there are lots of different products.” The wall, though, has a visible end point. Corporate filings show Kick Streaming’s sole shareholder is Easygo Entertainment, the same company that controls Stake. Tehrani owns about two-thirds of Easygo and Craven the rest, and executives are shared across the group. Separate teams they may be, but both report, in the end, to the same two men and the same holding company.
Wright is just as keen to correct the record on pay. For all the talk of streamers on five-figure hourly deals, he says Kick no longer signs contracts at all. “Kick doesn’t actually offer contracts.” The Kick Partner Program, which pays about 10,000 creators a week, sets a rate by how many people are watching, for how long, and how much they talk in the chat. A bigger audience earns a higher rate. The early days of guaranteed millions for marquee names, he says, are behind the company.
What that looks like for a viral star is more personal than the formula suggests. Smith, the streamer behind the Madonna moment, says Kick lets him “express myself exactly how I am”, and has backed him “in every angle, even personally”. He has met staff in London, been taken to dinner and keeps in touch by text and call.
For a steadier kind of creator, the appeal is plainer. Natalia, a Canberra mother of two who streams games as HeyImNatalia, switched to Kick from Twitch and YouTube and made it her full-time job within a month. The 95/5 split, she says, is the whole reason. “It still seems too good to be true, but it’s real.”
On platforms that take half a creator’s income or more, she says, “that’s the difference between making rent this week or paying my mortgage”. She has since bought a house on streaming income. “I got a mortgage,” she says. “So it’s a real job.”
She also disputes the idea that Kick is too toxic for serious brands. Signed to one of Australia’s biggest gaming agencies, Natalia says she has worked with household names including McDonald’s while building her career on Kick, after early conversations in which brands asked simply, “what is Kick?” The answer she and her management give is that “you’re sponsoring the creator, not the platform”.
Kick made its name partly on a reputation for lighter moderation than its rivals, and the cost has been heavy. In August last year, a French streamer known as Jean Pormanove died during a broadcast after months of on-air abuse carried out in front of an audience. French authorities opened investigations, and the case became a reference point in Europe’s scrutiny of the platform, though medical examiners concluded Pormanove’s death “was not traumatic in origin” and instead likely related to a “medical and/or toxicological” issue. For its part, Kick says its moderators found no illegal activity in his final stream, that the stunts on the channel were consensual. Much of the disturbing footage that spread afterwards came from earlier streams it had already acted on, Kick’s spokesman says.
In the United States, a series of class actions has named the rapper Drake, the streamer Adin Ross, who is one of Kick’s biggest draws, and Stake, alleging the casino runs illegal gambling disguised as a “social casino”. The allegations are contested and remain unproven.
The platform’s pull towards the extreme has a face in Braden Peters, who streams as Clavicular and has become a figurehead of “looksmaxxing”, a strain of male self-improvement with roots in incel forums. By early this year he was reportedly earning more than $US100,000 a month from Kick while promoting practices such as “bonesmashing”, anabolic steroids and crystal meth to stay lean. He has been banned and reinstated, his audience climbing.
Wright and Webb say they’re meeting the challenges head on with a trust and safety team of about 150 working around the clock from Melbourne, a second operation in Serbia, and software that scans billions of chat messages a day. The team has doubled or tripled in size, they say. “Are we moderating the same as what we were a couple of years ago? No,” Wright says. “We’re taking a stronger stance now.”
Not every creator’s experience matches the platform’s reputation. Natalia, who is gay and married, says she hesitated before joining Kick for exactly the reasons its critics raise, then found less hostility than she had met elsewhere, helped by moderation tools she can tune herself. “I haven’t felt unsafe as an LGBT creator on Kick,” she says.
For now, Kick is ballooning in size and popularity every day, and the founders are not looking for a way out. A public float is “not on the cards at this stage”, Wright says, and not in sight, because the machinery of going public would slow a company that values speed over almost everything. Webb is betting that live video wins as audiences tire of slick, AI-generated clips and begin to crave something they can trust is real. He describes a stuntman whose genuine footage was dismissed online as fake. “Live-streaming is the way that people will go,” he says. “What I just saw was real.”
Later this year, the company trades Collins Street for a bigger office in Cremorne, more room for the staff and the Friday prize wheel. The questions it has yet to answer travel with it. So does the green race car in the foyer.
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