Kick-Off: How Non-Exclusive Deals are Fuelling Streaming Platform's Growth 🚀
Despite signing an incredible $100m streaming deal ever with Kick, xQc has continued to stream on rival platform, Twitch - but it's all part of the plan, and provides an interesting lesson for sport.
Not yet a subscriber? Join 1000+ sports business leaders, from the PFL to the Premier League, that read Sports Pundit every week to get impactful industry insights.
BIG IDEA
In June, Twitch streamer Félix “xQC” Lengyel signed with a rival platform, Kick.
The deal, touted to be the largest streaming deal ever, is reported to be worth upwards of $100m over two years.
Despite this behemoth contract, xQC has still been streaming live on Twitch almost every day since – thanks to a non-exclusive clause.
At first this might seem bizarre, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
With an impressive following of 11.9 million on Twitch, xQc begins his day by streaming to this well-established audience to maintain and engage this existing community.
After spending a couple of hours there, he informs his viewers that he will be transitioning to Kick for the rest of the day, bringing a % of users over with him.
The strategy has proven to be largely successful.
On Kick, xQc's average viewership ranges from 36,000 to 55,000, while on Twitch, it's between 53,000 and 78,000. Considering that Kick has much lower numbers of organic traffic, this conversion rate is really quite impressive.
Kick has engaged in the same playbook with other creators as well.
A few days after signing xQc, the platform also announced a $30 million non-exclusive deal with Amouranth, the most popular female streamer on Twitch.
It would appear that Stake, the online casino company behind this new streaming platform, have learnt their lessons from Microsoft’s Mixer, a streaming platform who signed an exclusive deal to prize Tyler "Ninja" Blevins away from Twitch in 2019.
That endeavour ultimately failed because Microsoft struggled to reach the scale needed for Mixer to compete. Using only the Mixer platform, even Blevins wasn’t able to drive enough monthly active viewers to the new site from scratch. The friction was too high.
By June of 2020 the platform was shut down and existing partners were moved over to Facebook Gaming. Blevins ended up returning to Twitch shortly after.
For sport, the parallels of this story come in the form of sporting bodies who have committed to sitting entirely behind a pay TV wall – something which can be detrimental to the sport’s popularity more broadly.
In the UK for instance, cricket has grappled with this problem ever since 2006.
At the time, Giles Clarke, chairman of the ECB’s marketing committee, proudly declared that ‘every ball of every international match’ would be committed to be broadcast live on Sky Sports.
However, as Minal Modha eloquently summarised in her column for SportsPro, the impact of that move has been damning.
“Those from less affluent backgrounds have little-to-no means of watching the sport live, which in turn makes them less likely to either want to play the sport or get involved in the business of running it.”
Google Trends shows roughly how the popularity of the sport in the UK has ebbed and flowed, peaking during the Ashes in 2005 (the last to happen on free-to-air TV), and again more recently for England’s World Cup win (which was also broadcast on free-to-air).
With free-to-air usually not able to match the fees of pay TV broadcasters, Modha went on to suggest that she sees co-exclusive deals as a potential middle ground for sporting bodies that are grappling with the revenue vs reach equation.
Though not quite the same as the non-exclusive deals offered by Kick, co-exclusive deals, such as those signed by DAZN and YouTube for the UEFA Women’s Champions League and Sky and the BBC for Women’s Super League (WSL), have proved to bring in new audiences for the sports properties, while enabling them to receive a broadcast rights fee at the same time.
Similarly, for anyone (sports properties included) who has amassed a large following on social media, there are ample lessons to take from the Kick’s strategy in converting audience to a new platform.
As Jonathan Perelmen once said while VP of Agency Strategy and Industry Development at BuzzFeed,
“Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
Not yet a subscriber? Join 1000+ sports business leaders, from the PFL to Premier League, that read Sports Pundit every week to get impactful industry insights.
JOB BOARD
Chief of Staff - Six Nations Rugby (London, UK)
Senior Communications Manager - Formula E
Chief Marketing Officer - WME - William Morris Endeavor (Fort Worth, US)
General Manager, Sports - Barstool Sports (New York, US)
Senior Strategist - 160over90 (New York, US)
Do you have a job you’d like to promote to the amazing readers of this newsletter? Drop me a note at andy@sportspundit.org