Kick's 131% Growth in 2025: What Nordic Advertisers Need to Know for 2026

Kick Became a Real Platform in 2025

For two years Kick was discussed as a crypto-and-gambling-adjacent Twitch alternative that advertisers should monitor but not yet buy. That framing stopped being true in 2025. Streams Charts' 2025 Yearly Report shows Kick closed the year at 4.5 billion hours watched, up +131% year-over-year - the single biggest growth number in the entire live-streaming category.

The more important signal underneath that number is the shape of the growth. Kick didn't just add more casual viewers. It added creator inventory that advertisers can actually buy against - a mature tier of 10K+ average-viewer channels that didn't exist a year ago.

The 2025 Kick Numbers That Actually Matter

Why the 10K-Avg-Viewer Tier Matters More Than Total Hours

Aggregate hours watched grew 131%, but the advertiser-relevant signal is that the tier of creators averaging 10,000+ concurrent viewers doubled year-over-year. That's the layer of inventory brands can actually buy against for sponsored segments, native overlays, or multi-creator activations - a tier that was too thin in 2023–2024 to sustain a real Kick media plan.

Creator Handbook's 2025 Kick analysis flagged that 27% of creators streaming 1,000+ hours in the year now attract 100+ average viewers, up from 14% in 2024. That's the middle-tier depth that advertisers actually buy against for mid-tier programmatic overlays and sponsor integrations - and it doubled in a year.

Kick Crossed 100 Million Registered Users

In April 2026, Kick crossed the 100-million-registered-users threshold, a milestone platform milestones that Kick's own co-founder Ed Craven publicly called "a vanity metric" given that a large share of those accounts had minimal activity. The framing matters: the 100M figure is real, but advertisers should evaluate Kick on engaged hours (4.5B - where the money is) rather than account counts (100M - which is marketing surface).

The Content Mix That Nordic Brands Should Read Carefully

Kick's 2025 content distribution differs structurally from Twitch's:

The gambling category at 11% of hours remains the single largest reason Nordic advertisers have been cautious about Kick. For brand-safety reasons, most consumer-brand budgets exclude gambling content entirely; the Kick inventory available after that exclusion is closer to 89% of total hours, with FPS + Just Chatting + IRL making up the majority of what a Norwegian CPG campaign would actually buy against.

The fast growth in Just Chatting (+68%) and IRL (+337%) is the signal worth tracking. These categories didn't exist at scale on Kick in 2024 and now rival the equivalent Twitch inventory. For lifestyle, travel, SaaS and retail advertisers, this is where Kick became legitimately buyable.

Top Kick Creators That Advertisers Can Actually Activate

Source: Streams Charts 2025 Yearly Report.

For Nordic advertisers: the English-language international Kick tier is buyable. There is no Norwegian/Swedish/Finnish Kick creator in the international top tier as of EOY 2025, but Nordic mid-tier Kick channels (1,000–5,000 avg viewers) now exist in enough volume that a Nordic-specific Kick campaign is operationally feasible. Beta Ads' campaign with Komplett on Kick hit 4.48% peak-day CTR as part of a combined Twitch + Kick activation - an early example of what Nordic Kick inventory can deliver when sourced properly.

What the Growth Curve Means for 2026 CPMs

The standard economic pattern when an ad platform doubles supply in a year is a short window where CPMs remain low because advertiser demand hasn't caught up. Awisee's 2025 streaming CPM analysis and industry commentary in Digiday both suggest Kick inventory in 2025 traded at 30–50% below equivalent Twitch CPMs in most regions.

That gap will compress through 2026 as brand budgets rotate in. Advertisers testing Kick now are buying supply before the repricing; advertisers waiting until 2027 will pay the mid-market rate. This is the same dynamic that played out on Twitch in 2018–2020 and on TikTok in 2020–2022.

How Beta Ads Handles Kick Inventory in the Nordic Market

Beta Ads' platform indexes 2,800+ Nordic Kick streamers alongside 39,000+ total Nordic creators across Twitch, YouTube and Kick. Native overlay formats run identically across platforms (rendered inside the stream frame, adblock-immune), meaning Kick is a distribution channel inside a larger campaign rather than a separate buy. For a Norwegian or Swedish brand, that lets a single creative and single report cover both platforms - the operational simplicity that makes platform diversification realistic for mid-budget campaigns.

Action Items for 2026 Nordic Media Planning

1. Test Kick inventory in 2026, not 2027. CPMs will be higher in 12 months. Budget 10–15% of a Nordic gaming or lifestyle test campaign toward Kick creators in the next two quarters.
2. Exclude gambling content at the category level in any brand-safety brief. It's 11% of Kick hours and doesn't fit most consumer-brand guidelines.
3. Prioritise Just Chatting and IRL if your product sits outside pure gaming. These are the fastest-growing Kick categories and they're buyable now.
4. Require platform-verified reporting. Kick's native analytics are immature compared to Twitch. Only buy through platforms or agencies that layer their own verification on top.
5. Think about Kick as part of a combined Twitch+Kick campaign, not as a standalone test. The Komplett case study is a model: one creative, two platforms, one report.

Ready to scope a Nordic campaign that includes Kick inventory? Book a 20-minute consultation - we'll walk through category fit, available Kick creators, and realistic CTR expectations.

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Sources: Streams Charts - 2025 Yearly Report · Streams Charts - Kick reaches 100M users · Creator Handbook - Kick growth analysis · Awisee - Twitch CPM rates 2025 · Digiday · Beta Ads - Komplett case study