AAA<\/p>\n
The green Formula 1 car parked on the third floor is the first clue this is no ordinary office. It\u2019s painted in the colours of Stake, an unlicensed online crypto casino that has made billionaires out of two Australian 30-somethings.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The company says it has passed 100 million users in three years and hands the people who stream on it 95\u00a2 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).<\/p>\n
The office, on Collins Street in Melbourne, has the feel of a start-up that hasn\u2019t quite noticed how big it has become. The football World Cup plays on the screens next to the company\u2019s internal targets. There are table-tennis tables, a pinball machine and fridges of free beer.<\/p>\n
![\"Kick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/7b42cc93b8548765a8a5858418636c631679a7d0.jpeg\")
Kick bosses Ryan Webb and Ethan Wright. Photo: Ruby Alexander.<\/p>\n
On level four, at a desk no bigger than anyone else\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI speak to Ed every single day,\u201d says Ethan Wright, director of Kick. \u201cHe sits exactly the same as me, at a desk like anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s subscription revenue, Kick keeps 5 per cent and returns the rest. \u201cEveryone was dying for some sort of competition in the market,\u201d says Ryan Webb, the company\u2019s head of growth and revenue, \u201cwhich is what we wanted to give them.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/f9c1af831254fc278dcfe2d3bd71cd6b41d4c807.jpeg\")
A Kick streamer broadcasting himself gambling on the Stake casino site.<\/p>\n
Those headline figures are central to Kick\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
What is harder to wave away is its global spread. Peru\u2019s congress streams its sessions on Kick to reach younger voters; in Saudi Arabia the company claims most of the market.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Into the Groove on a night out. It sent the 1985 track back into the UK charts four decades later. Madonna\u2019s team contacted Kick, he says, and weeks later he was livestreaming from inside her London townhouse. \u201cWe can put a tagline,\u201d Webb says, only half-joking. \u201cThe Melbourne live-stream platform that put Madonna back in the charts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kick\u2019s rise comes as its bigger rivals turn respectable. YouTube has won the global rights to broadcast the Oscars from 2029<\/a> and is pushing into late-night television; Twitch has become a venue for mainstream politics and the games industry. Kick\u2019s executives are betting they can walk a tightrope between controversy and community that the others have largely stepped off.<\/p>\n Kick\u2019s rise comes as the platforms it competes with harden into cultural institutions.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Related Article 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 the price, its critics say, of an audience built on shock.<\/p>\n That any of it runs out of Melbourne still surprises the people running it. \u201cI\u2019m probably a little bit delusional or obsessive,\u201d Wright says, \u201cbut we were going to make this really amazing thing happen out of Melbourne.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There are no outside shareholders. \u201cWe\u2019re founder-led,\u201d Wright says. \u201cWe don\u2019t have external stakeholders.\u201d<\/p>\n The company is still unprofitable, and is only now testing the advertising business it hopes will one day cover its costs.<\/p>\n Kick loses money, and a gambling fortune keeps it afloat. Andrei Zanescu, a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal, argued from Kick\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 955,000 and YouTube\u2019s 1.4 million.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cslots\u201d: creators gambling on online casino games, many of them Stake\u2019s, live on camera. Put to Wright, the argument draws a precise answer: gambling is the one thing Kick will not pay people to broadcast. \u201cSlots is actually a demonetised category,\u201d he says. \u201cYou do not get paid for streaming in it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAccess is tacit approval,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Related Article 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\u2019s list of blocked sites. \u201cIt seems clear the platform is providing customers to the casino,\u201d he says. \u201cIt seems senseless otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cringfenced from any other organisation\u201d.<\/p>\n Webb reaches for the obvious comparison. \u201cAmazon\u2019s a good example, where there are lots of different products.\u201d The wall, though, has a visible end point. Corporate filings show Kick Streaming\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cKick doesn\u2019t actually offer contracts.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Related Article 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 \u201cexpress myself exactly how I am\u201d, and has backed him \u201cin every angle, even personally\u201d. He has met staff in London, been taken to dinner and keeps in touch by text and call. <\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt still seems too good to be true, but it\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n On platforms that take half a creator\u2019s income or more, she says, \u201cthat\u2019s the difference between making rent this week or paying my mortgage\u201d. She has since bought a house on streaming income. \u201cI got a mortgage,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it\u2019s a real job.\u201d<\/p>\n She also disputes the idea that Kick is too toxic for serious brands. Signed to one of Australia\u2019s biggest gaming agencies, Natalia says she has worked with household names including McDonald\u2019s while building her career on Kick, after early conversations in which brands asked simply, \u201cwhat is Kick?\u201d The answer she and her management give is that \u201cyou\u2019re sponsoring the creator, not the platform\u201d.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s scrutiny of the platform, though medical examiners concluded Pormanove\u2019s death \u201cwas not traumatic in origin\u201d and instead likely related to a \u201cmedical and\/or toxicological\u201d 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\u2019s spokesman says.<\/p>\n In the United States, a series of class actions<\/a> has named the rapper Drake, the streamer Adin Ross, who is one of Kick\u2019s biggest draws, and Stake, alleging the casino runs illegal gambling disguised as a \u201csocial casino\u201d. The allegations are contested and remain unproven.<\/p>\n The platform\u2019s pull towards the extreme has a face in Braden Peters, who streams as Clavicular and has become a figurehead of \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d, 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 \u201cbonesmashing\u201d, anabolic steroids and crystal meth to stay lean. He has been banned and reinstated, his audience climbing.<\/p>\n Wright and Webb say they\u2019re 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. \u201cAre we moderating the same as what we were a couple of years ago? No,\u201d Wright says. \u201cWe\u2019re taking a stronger stance now.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Rapha\u00ebl](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ad9353f5e1d8ac019d2cb50d7192889b561f1c7311738f5263822faa4f8c9e4b.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Billionaire](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/acaf21bd914beb6acf51508edacf5b2e0db0e279.jpeg\")
Billionaire Stake and Kick co-founder Ed Craven, who streams live on the site regularly.Elke Meitzel<\/p>\n![\"Kick.com.\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/00df724b5502185376c9176adcc08892e88e5e28.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Drake](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/90b89084e53d777b8a82c853467a2092fb5bf52c.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Braden](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/b79caf5559ef1b08ea59f9086a56b40486325b11ced2dbecc5840fbd287d13f3.jpeg\")
Braden Peters, aka Clavicular.The New York Times<\/p>\n
![\"Privacy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782616758_407_edf7f98db6bb4f87064284987f004eb11905f9bd.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n