Do Streamers Keep Simulcasting? 10,328 Tracked for 4 Weeks

Only a minority keep it up. Between September 28 and October 26, 2026, 10,328 streamers went live on Kick and Twitch at the same time, under the same name and in the same category, for at least an hour in at least one week. 49.3% of them did it in only one of the four weeks we measured, and 15.4% did it in all four. From one week to the next, 42.3% of simulcasters stopped and about as many new ones started, which is why the weekly total barely moved (5,063, 4,995, 5,070 and 5,055). The 1,593 streamers who simulcast every week carried 71.8% of all the viewing we measured during simulcasts.

The figures come from PlayerSells' own live samplers, which read Kick's whole live directory and the top streams of every Twitch category every 15 minutes. This is the fourth week of our simulcast series, after September 28 to October 4, October 6 to October 12 and October 13 to October 19, and the first time we follow the same streamers across weeks. Streams Charts reported in August 2026 that Kick averaged 19.52% of channel hours watched among the top 500 multistreaming creators of the first half of 2026. That figure, like our earlier weeks, describes how a simulcaster's audience splits, not whether streamers keep simulcasting. It matters because, as Streams Charts reported in July 2026, Kick Partners who stream on a competing platform switch on a Multistreaming toggle that cuts their payout by 50% for every hour live there.

Key findings, September 28 to October 26, 2026

• 57.7% of a week's simulcasters simulcast again the next week (56.0%, 59.7% and 57.5% in the three week-to-week steps).
• The strongest pattern is time spent: streamers who simulcast under 2 hours in a week did it again 35.2% of the time, those who simulcast 30 hours or more 94.9%.
• Bigger channels kept going more often: 46.5% for streams averaging under 10 combined viewers, 81.5% for 1,000 or more. Kick channels with the verified badge: 75.9%, without it 51.6%.
• Streamers who drew a larger share of their audience on Kick were less likely to continue: 66.2% with under 10% on Kick, 45.8% with 50% or more.
• After stopping, 37.9% were still live on Kick but not seen on Twitch, and 6.6% were live on Twitch with no Kick stream at all.
• The same-streamer test from last week held: Twitch viewers while also live on Kick changed by a median 0.0% (3,042 channels), and combined viewers were +27.9% above Twitch-only hours.

How many streamers simulcast on Kick and Twitch each week?

About five thousand, and the number barely changes: 5,063, 4,995, 5,070 and 5,055 in the four weeks. A simulcaster here is a streamer live on Kick and Twitch under the same name, in the same 15-minute block and the same category, for at least an hour in the week. They are a small part of Kick: 4.36% of the 109,263 Kick channels live for 2 hours or more in the latest week. The median simulcaster drew 21.4% of their combined viewers on Kick, close to the earlier weeks. The total Kick share jumped in the third week because the Brand Risk 16 fight card on Adin Ross's channels alone was 19.8% of that week's simulcast viewing.

Kick and Twitch, weeks of September 28 to October 26, 2026 (UTC). The first three weeks are recomputed from the same per-channel data as the earlier articles and match their published figures. Viewers are summed over 15-minute blocks in which the streamer was live on both.

How many simulcasters do it again the next week?

A little over half. Across the three week-to-week steps, 15,128 weekly simulcasters could have continued, and 57.7% did. Each week, the streamers who stopped were replaced by roughly as many who had not simulcast the week before, 41.2% to 43.2% of the next week's total. The ones who continued are the larger streams: they carried 92.3% and 93.5% of the previous week's simulcast viewing in the first two steps. In the last step the figure fell to 69.8%, mostly because Adin Ross, whose Brand Risk 16 event dominated the third week, did not meet the simulcast definition in the fourth; without that channel it was 87.1%.

"Simulcast again" means the streamer met the same definition (an hour or more live on both, same name, same category) in the following week. "New" counts the following week's simulcasters who had not met it the week before.

Who keeps simulcasting and who stops?

Streamers who simulcast for longer and draw more viewers. Of those who simulcast under 2 hours in a week, 35.2% did it again the next week; between 2 and 10 hours, 61.1%; between 10 and 30 hours, 88.3%; at 30 hours or more, 94.9%. Size points the same way, from 46.5% for streams averaging under 10 combined viewers to 81.5% at 1,000 or more, and Kick channels with the verified badge continued more often (75.9% against 51.6%). The last two columns repeat the test where a missing Twitch stream cannot be a gap in our data (see the section on the Twitch sampler below); the ordering is the same.

All three week-to-week steps pooled, September 28 to October 26, 2026. Average combined viewers = Kick plus Twitch viewers per 15-minute block while live on both. The fully read check covers the step from October 13 to 19 into October 20 to 26 only: streamers live on Kick for at least 2 hours in blocks where our Twitch sampler read every live stream of the matching category, and whether they were seen on Twitch in at least an hour of those blocks.

Do streamers with more viewers on Kick keep simulcasting?

Less often than those with few: the more of a streamer's audience was on Kick, the less likely the streamer was to keep simulcasting. With under 10% of combined viewers on Kick, 66.2% continued; with 50% or more, 45.8%. The gap is there inside each band of hours under 30 (for 2 to 10 hours, 68.6% against 51.0%) and in the fully read check (74.8% against 57.2%), so it is not only an effect of hours simulcast or of our Twitch sampler. Public data cannot say why. One factor that fits the pattern, though we cannot test it, is Kick's Partner rule: a payout cut of 50% per multistream hour costs more the larger the Kick side of the audience. Streamers who simulcast every week had a median Kick share of 13.0%; those who simulcast in only one week, 33.3%.

Share of streamers who simulcast again the next week, by their Kick share and hours simulcast in the first week. All three steps pooled, September 28 to October 26, 2026; fully read check as in the table above.

How many streamers simulcast every week?

1,593, or 15.4% of the 10,328 who simulcast at least once in the four weeks. They are about a third of any single week's simulcasters (31.5% in the latest week) but carried 71.8% of all simulcast viewing, while the 5,090 one-week simulcasters carried 9.6%. The median every-week streamer simulcast 6.5 hours a week; the median one-week streamer, 1.75 hours. Stopping is not always final: 1,122 streamers skipped a week and came back, and 30.7% of those who stopped after the first week simulcast again in the third or fourth. 29.2% of the latest week's simulcasters had not simulcast in any of the three weeks before.

Streamers who met the simulcast definition in at least one of the four weeks, September 28 to October 26, 2026. Medians are over the streamer's simulcasting weeks. Simulcast viewing = Kick plus Twitch viewer hours while live on both, 75,356,635 hours in total.

What do streamers do after they stop simulcasting?

Most keep streaming, and more of them stay visible on Kick than on Twitch alone. Of the 6,395 times a streamer stopped simulcasting, 37.9% were live on Kick the next week without being seen on Twitch, 37.6% were live on both but not together for an hour in the same category, 17.9% were not seen live on either, and 6.6% were live on Twitch with no Kick stream at all. The Kick and Twitch figures are not equally certain. Our Kick sampler reads every live channel, so "no Kick stream" is a real absence. Our Twitch sampler sees only the top 30 streams of each category, so "not seen on Twitch" includes some streams too small to be read; the next section measures how much.

Every case of a weekly simulcaster not simulcasting the next week, three steps pooled, September 28 to October 26, 2026.

Is the drop real, or a gap in the Twitch data?

Mostly real. Our Twitch sampler reads only the top 30 live streams of each category, so a small Twitch stream can vanish from our data without ending. To rule that out we used the latest step only, and only blocks where the same-named Twitch category had fewer than 30 live streams, which means every Twitch stream in it was read. 3,304 of the 5,070 simulcasters of October 13 to 19 were live on Kick for at least 2 hours in such blocks the following week. 73.0% of them simulcast again by our usual definition, 64.9% were seen live on both for at least an hour inside those fully read blocks, and 20.7% never appeared on Twitch in those blocks at all: they were on Kick and certainly not live on Twitch in a matching category. Of the 891 in this group who stopped by our usual definition, 73.0% never appeared on Twitch in the fully read blocks and only 3.1% were in fact seen simulcasting there. The differences by hours, size, badge and Kick share keep their direction in the fully read data (tables above). The group leans toward streamers who kept streaming on Kick, so its rate of continuing is higher than the overall 57.7%.

Did simulcasting still add reach in the fourth week?

Yes. Last week we compared each simulcaster with themselves: the same channel, category and 3-hour window of the day, in hours live on both platforms against hours live on one. Repeated for October 20 to 26, the result held. Twitch viewers while also live on Kick changed by a median 0.0%, Kick viewers while also live on Twitch by +7.7%, and combined viewers were +27.9% above the same streamer's Twitch-only hours, with 86.4% of channels higher. On average, then, simulcasting did not cost the typical streamer Twitch viewers, which makes a lost Twitch audience an unlikely main reason for stopping.

Median change across channels; Twitch figures use only blocks where the Twitch category had fewer than 30 live streams. Method as in the third-week article.

Which large streamers simulcast every week?

Mostly streamers whose audience sits on Twitch, plus two esports broadcast channels (Valorant and ESLCS). Five of the ten drew under 10% of their combined viewers on Kick and still simulcast every week. xQc simulcast 195.25 hours over the four weeks with 26.8% of combined viewers on Kick. Every channel in the table carries Kick's verified badge.

Streamers who met the simulcast definition in all four weeks, ranked by Kick plus Twitch viewer hours while live on both, September 28 to October 26, 2026. Hours by week in date order.

How we measured

Two samplers run every 15 minutes. The Kick sampler reads Kick's whole live directory with each channel's viewer count and category. The Twitch sampler reads the top 30 live streams of every Twitch category, because Twitch's public API stops paging there. A streamer counts as a simulcaster in a week when the Kick channel name and the Twitch login match after lower-casing and removing "-" and "_", both are live in the same 15-minute block in at least 4 blocks (an hour), and the categories match in at least half of those blocks. The weeks are September 28 to October 4, October 6 to October 12, October 13 to October 19 and October 20 to October 26, 2026, in UTC. Raw 15-minute samples are kept for about 8 days, so the first three weeks were rebuilt from the per-channel outputs saved when those weeks were first measured; the counts match the published articles exactly. In the latest week the samplers recorded 670 of 672 blocks on Kick and 662 on Twitch. A streamer "simulcast again" when the same name met the definition the following week. The tables are open data at github.com/playersells/open-data (CC BY 4.0); no channel list is published there.

Limitations

• Twitch top 30. Small Twitch streams in busy categories are not read, so some streamers counted as stopping were still on Twitch. The fully read check above limits the effect but covers one step and the categories with fewer than 30 live streams.
• Name matching. Streamers who use different names on the two platforms are missed, and a change of name looks like stopping. Every channel named here carries Kick's verified badge, which is not the same as Kick Partner status.
• A one-hour threshold. A streamer near an hour a week can cross it in one week and not the next without changing habits; that is part of why short simulcasters continue less often.
• Four weeks. October 5 falls between the first and second weeks and is not covered. Four weeks cannot show seasonal changes or long breaks.
• Why streamers stop. We see behaviour, not reasons. We cannot see contracts, Partner status, the Multistreaming toggle or payouts.
• Displayed viewer counts. Kick and Twitch count viewers in their own ways; we cannot separate real viewers from embeds, bots or inflated counts.

Frequently asked questions

Do most streamers keep simulcasting on Kick and Twitch?

Not week after week. Of 10,328 streamers who simulcast at least once between September 28 and October 26, 2026, 49.3% did it in only one week and 15.4% in all four. From one week to the next, 57.7% continued.

Which streamers stick with simulcasting?

The ones who do it for longer and have larger audiences. 94.9% of streamers who simulcast 30 hours or more in a week did it again the next week, against 35.2% of those who simulcast under 2 hours.

Does simulcasting on Kick lower your Twitch viewers?

Not in our data. For the same streamers in the same category and time of day, Twitch viewers while also live on Kick changed by a median 0.0% (3,042 channels, October 20 to 26, 2026), the same as the week before.

How many streamers simulcast on Kick and Twitch?

About five thousand a week: 5,055 in the week of October 20 to October 26, 2026. Over four weeks, 10,328 different streamers did it at least once.

For channel-level numbers, see our Kick channel rankings and Twitch channel rankings, built from the same samplers, or check a single channel with the Kick follower rank and Twitch follower rank tools. For how Kick and Twitch compare overall, read Kick vs Twitch: which platform has the viewers and when streamers go live.