Kick just announced 100 million registered users. The announcement came with a celebration video, fireworks energy, the whole package. It is a massive number. On paper, Kick is now one of the biggest platforms in the livestreaming space.
But here is the thing about big numbers: they only matter if you look at what is behind them.
I did. And what I found paints a very different picture.
The Vodra Study: 68.7% of Kick Viewers Could Be Bots
In 2025, an analytics firm called Vodra published a behavioral analysis of livestream platforms, covering January through August 2025. The study analyzed 52,314 streams from 4,567 streamers across both Twitch and Kick.
The headline finding: the mean estimated bot prevalence on Kick was 68.7% of concurrent viewers (with a 95% confidence interval of 63.5% to 73.9%). For comparison, Twitch came in at 39.6%. Both platforms had a bot problem, but Kick's was nearly double.
Estimated bot prevalence in concurrent viewers
Now, this is one study. It has a margin of error. It is not gospel. But it is also not the only signal pointing in this direction.
The 164% Surge in Suspicious Streams
A whitepaper published by Streams Charts and Audiencly in late 2025 looked at the scope of viewbotting across platforms. The data they found on Kick was hard to ignore.
During Q2 2025, the number of suspicious channels on Kick sat at around 7,700. By Q3, that number had jumped to 20,300. That is a 164% increase in one quarter. While Twitch was actively clamping down on viewbot operations and reducing the number of suspicious streams on its platform, Kick's problem was reportedly getting worse.
The whitepaper also flagged that roughly one in six Kick streamers with 50+ average viewers showed signs of viewbotting. The estimated fake hours watched came in at around 20 million. That is 20 million hours of nobody watching anything.
Suspicious channels on Kick
+164% single quarter increase (Q2 to Q3 2025).
A separate analysis by Stream Hatchet, published in October 2025, independently confirmed the same trend. Kick's suspicious activity was climbing at the exact same time Twitch was getting its bot problem under control.
Even Kick's CEO Admitted the Problem
In early January 2026, Kick CEO Eddie Craven made a public admission that viewbotting was a serious issue on the platform. He referenced fellow streamer Trainwreck, who had been calling out the problem for years.
Craven's quote, in his own words: "I thought TrainwrecksTV was crazy. Turns out I was the crazy one." He went on to say that "it is a really bad problem and a lot of people are involved in it."
That is the CEO of the platform telling you the viewer numbers on his own site cannot be trusted. Not some outside critic. Not a competitor. The guy running the company.
Kick's viewbot saga — a timeline
Mid 2023
Jan – Aug 2025
Q2 – Q3 2025
Jan 2026
Apr 2026
What Does "100 Million Users" Actually Mean?
"Registered users" is one of the loosest metrics in tech. It counts every account that was ever created. It does not mean 100 million people are using Kick. It does not mean 100 million people have ever watched a stream. It means 100 million accounts exist in a database.
Some of those are real people. Some are duplicate accounts. Some are bot accounts created to inflate viewer counts. Some are accounts that signed up once, never came back, and forgot the password. The number itself tells you almost nothing about actual engagement.
For context, Kick reportedly had around 2 million daily active users as of late 2025. That is a fraction of the registered total. The gap between "registered" and "active" is where the real story lives.
Related: When Platforms Fight Back
My own X account got mass reported and suspended after publishing an expose. Fake accounts, inauthentic engagement, and mass reports are tools in this industry. I know firsthand what happens when you get attention from the wrong people.
The Math Problem
Let's play with the numbers for a second. Take the Vodra estimate at face value: roughly 68.7% of concurrent viewers on Kick could be bots. Apply a similar ratio to registered accounts (which is generous, since bot account creation is even easier than bot viewing), and you are looking at something like 30 million real users and 70 million accounts that exist purely to make the platform look bigger than it is.
Is that exactly right? Probably not. The real number could be higher or lower. But directionally, it is consistent with everything else I have seen. The Vodra data, the Streams Charts data, the Stream Hatchet data, and Kick's own CEO all point in the same direction: the numbers on Kick are not what they seem.
Why This Matters
This is not just about vanity metrics. Inflated viewer counts affect real people and real money.
Streamers negotiate sponsorship deals based on viewer numbers. If two thirds of those viewers are bots, streamers are either overpaid (which sponsors will figure out eventually) or competing against people whose inflated numbers make them look more popular than they actually are.
Advertisers are spending money on impressions that nobody sees. The Vodra study specifically called out the ad waste implications. Brands paying for eyeballs are getting server pings instead.
The platform itself uses these numbers to attract investment, partnerships, and exclusivity deals. If those numbers are significantly inflated, that raises serious questions about the foundation those deals are built on.
What I Think
I am not saying Kick is faking its own numbers. Viewbotting is mostly done by individual streamers or third party services, not necessarily by the platform itself. And Kick has reportedly taken some steps to address the problem, including updating its community guidelines in March 2026 to target "integrity and authenticity."
But here is the question nobody at Kick seems to want to answer: if they know the bot problem is this bad (their own CEO said so), why celebrate a user milestone that is almost certainly inflated by the very bots they claim to be fighting?
100 million users sounds incredible. It is a number designed to impress. But when you zoom in, the picture gets blurry. And in this industry, blurry numbers are rarely an accident.
The real flex would be telling me how many of those 100 million are still there after the bots log out.
