For brands
Advertising on Kick: The Complete 2026 Guide
By Franziska Händel · Chief Growth Officer
Anyone researching advertising on Kick runs into the same wall: there is no official self-service ad marketplace like YouTube's or Meta's. The platform is young, growing quickly, and funded differently than Twitch. That is exactly what makes it interesting for brands, because where established booking routes are missing, attention is not yet crowded.
What sets Kick apart from Twitch
Kick launched in 2022 and made its name with generous terms for streamers, who keep a much larger share of their subscription revenue than on Twitch. That attracts creators who feel underpaid elsewhere, and their communities follow.
For advertisers this means two things. First, Kick currently has no pre-roll marketplace comparable to what Twitch offers through Amazon Ads. Second, the audience overlaps with Twitch's but is on average even harder to reach through classic channels: young, ad-averse, and quick to skip anything that interrupts.
The realistic routes to advertising on Kick
Direct sponsorships work on Kick the way they work everywhere: brand contacts streamer, negotiates price and deliverables, hopes the reach numbers are honest. The per-deal overhead stays high, and on a young platform reliable benchmarks are scarce.
In-stream ads are the second route, and the one we built. Because the ad runs as an overlay inside the stream image itself, embedded through a browser source in OBS, it is platform-independent. The same mechanism that works on Twitch works on Kick and YouTube. Our in-stream ads explainer covers the format in detail.
For a campaign this means you are not booking "ads on Kick" — you are booking reach inside livestreams, and Kick channels are part of the pool. Billing is per verified impression, regardless of which platform the stream runs on.
What to watch out for on Kick
Kick draws recurring criticism for lax moderation. Brand safety is therefore not a side note: check whether your advertising partner curates channels, offers industry exclusions, and categorizes content. On our platform, streamers pass a review before they deliver campaigns, and brands can exclude industries and contexts.
The second point is measurability. Precisely because the platform is young, do not settle for screenshots and self-reported numbers. Verified impressions from live stream data are just as possible on Kick as on Twitch when the technology is in place.
Is it worth being early?
First-mover advantages are real in advertising markets: less competition for attention, lower prices, and lessons learned before your competitors arrive. Kick is a candidate for exactly that, as long as budget and expectations match the platform's current size. A pragmatic start: set up a test budget on our advertiser page, include Kick channels in the pool, and compare results against Twitch channels.