Twitch loses yet another huge creator, as Amouranth suddenly moves to rival platform Kick. Amouranth, Twitch's most popular female streamer of 2022, also criticized the Amazon-owned site alongside the news, saying that its business model will "never be able to achieve profitability," under its current plans.
This comes just days since the last big blow for Twitch, as xQc also moves to Kick in an eyewatering deal valued up to $100 million. It could be the start of many other creators doing the same, as Twitch constantly finds itself embroiled in controversy surrounding bans, ad placement, and overall monetisation issues.
Amouranth, real name Kaitlyn Siragusa, announced the platform switch yesterday as she celebrated her seventh anniversary of becoming a streamer. Partway through the celebrations, she went offline on Twitch and resumed streaming on Kick instead, indicating that she's now Kick exclusive.
In fact, she's actually live on Kick at the time of writing, and more importantly, not live on Twitch. It's not yet known if she's signed any kind of deal with the platform or just chose to stop using Twitch of her own volition. And if she did get a deal, we're not sure how it will compare to the contract xQc just signed, which interestingly enough, actually allows him to stream on other platforms too.
Whatever the case, Amouranth has made it clear that she wasn't happy with how Twitch is running things. Speaking on her personal account after the news dropped, the streamer said, "Twitch’s 'sin' isn’t trying to squeeze their creators. Their sin is making a business model that doesn’t succeed."
She goes on to explain how she feels the Twitch model only works if it reaches "YouTube scale" success, yet also feels that streaming has a significantly smaller potential market than YouTube viewers. Of course, it's hard to imagine all the people that casually use YouTube using Twitch in the same manner.
While she hasn't mentioned this as part of her reasoning, there's also the fact that Twitch has banned her a bunch of times already - six, if I'm counting correctly. She's hardly unique in this, as streamers have long complained of receiving bans without explanation, typically unbanned in a week or so.
Although in some cases, these bans are understandable. Adin Ross - another Twitch alumni who recently moved to Kick - was banned for an eighth time in February of this year. The reason for the ban wasn't clear, but it was around the time that Ross was falling down the alt-right rabbit hole, befriending Andrew Tate, idolising Donald Trump, and trying to get Kanye West on stream while he was aligning himself with Neo Nazis and defending Hitler. Even moving to Kick wasn't enough to stop the bans, so the platform definitely has some rules it enforces.