Kick Admits $150M Viewbot Problem

Kick’s Partnership Problem

Kick co-founder Eddie has publicly acknowledged what many suspected: the platform’s ambitious $150 million Partnership Program has been systematically exploited by viewbotters, and the company has taken drastic action to clean it up.

In a statement posted to X this week, Eddie revealed that Kick has removed “almost 1,000 abusers” from the program, corrected “inflated views,” and “nuked millions of bot accounts” after completely rebuilding their view count system.

What Is the Kick Partnership Program?

For context, Kick’s Partnership Program (KPP) launched in February 2024 as the Kick Creator Incentive Program, a model that pays streamers per view, in real-time, for every organic viewer on their live streams.

The program’s key selling points:

• Revenue per view: Creators earn money based on concurrent viewership during each stream, paid out immediately
• Industry-leading sub split: 95/5 revenue share on subscriptions (compared to Twitch’s standard 50/50)
• No platform ads required: The entire program is “funded entirely out of Kick’s pocket,” not tied to advertising revenue
• Multistreaming allowed: Creators can stream to multiple platforms simultaneously, though they earn 50% of their usual KPP rate when doing so

It’s an aggressive program designed to lure talent away from Twitch and YouTube by offering guaranteed baseline income regardless of ad performance or sponsorships.

The Viewbot Reckoning

Eddie’s statement confirms the obvious: when you pay creators based purely on viewer count with minimal verification, you create a massive incentive for viewbotting.

The scale of the problem is staggering:

• Nearly 1,000 partnership accounts removed for abuse
• Millions of bot accounts eliminated from the platform
• $150 million in total payouts since launch (though an unknown portion went to fraudulent streams)
• Systematic view inflation requiring a complete rebuild of Kick’s view count system

Eddie frames the cleanup as a positive: “After rebuilding our view count system… the program is in a healthier spot than ever. Payouts are only reduced when underlying views aren’t truly authentic.” He adds that “recovered funds will always be redirected to creators with earned audiences and communities.”

This Sounds Familiar

If you’ve been following Stream Report this year, this story should ring some bells. In July, we covered Twitch’s major viewbot crackdown, where the platform finally got serious about detecting and filtering artificial viewership. Then in September, we reported on Twitch hitting a five-year viewership low as those detection systems took effect, with StreamCharts estimating 30 million fake hours watched in Q2 2025 alone.

Now here’s Kick, admitting to essentially the same problem but on an even more financially impactful scale because they’re directly paying creators based on those inflated numbers.

The pattern is clear: viewbotting isn’t a platform-specific problem, it’s an industry-wide epidemic.

What This Means for the Streaming Industry

This situation highlights a fundamental tension in streaming platform economics: the easier you make it to earn money based on metrics, the more you incentivize gaming those metrics.

1. Twitch’s approach: make monetization harder to access (Affiliate and Partner requirements) while offering more diverse revenue streams (ads, subs, bits, bounties).
2. Kick’s approach: make monetization extremely accessible and lucrative from day one, funded directly by the platform.

For the industry as a whole, this is another reminder that viewbotting remains one of streaming’s biggest unsolved problems. Twitch has spent years building detection systems and still struggles with it. YouTube deals with it constantly. And now Kick is learning the hard way that paying creators based on easily manipulated metrics is a recipe for disaster.

Pete’s Content Corner

Delve into my weekly selection of content creation highlights – handpicked videos, podcasts, and tweets that promise to captivate, educate, and entertain.

1. Twitch’s third annual Together for Good charity event runs November 17 – December 2, presented by Wicked: For Good. Use the #TogetherForGood tag to get featured on the Together for Good Shelf, and unlock exclusive Wicked-themed emotes and badges throughout the event.
2. Patreon launched a major discovery overhaul including a new home feed, “Quips” (short social posts for free discovery), and collab posts that let creators co-author content to reach each other’s audiences.
3. The Streamer Awards 2025 voting is now open for the annual awards show. Running since 2022, the community-voted awards recognize creators and communities across diverse categories spanning games, content types, and platforms. The ceremony broadcasts live December 6th at 3:00 PM PT.

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read Stream Report.

Pete ✌️