Turkish Twitch streamers are actively transitioning to other platforms after the Amazon-owned streaming service was banned in the country. In particular, popular content creators from Turkey are increasingly turning to Kick, one of Twitch's main competitors.
So, what happened? In February 2024, the Turkish government restricted access to both Kick and Twitch within the country due to the gambling content of these platforms (such as slot streams, online casinos, etc.). Kick's administration found a compromise by limiting Turkish users' access to the gambling sections. As a result, the platform continued to operate within the country, while Twitch remained under sanctions. However, the Turkish government has yet to enforce its ban fully: some local streamers like wtcN, imorr, and rootthegamer continue to broadcast on Twitch.
The impact of the bans on both services is visible in the charts depicting the dynamics of watch time and the number of active streaming channels. In February, just before the ban, Turkish Twitch streamers generated up to 1.4M Hours Watched per day. In March, this figure didn't get above 878K HW.
As for Kick, Turkish watch time nearly doubled. The best performance of Turkish streamers in February amounted to 353K Hours Watched, while this figure increased to 652K HW in March.
When it comes to the dynamics channel activity, the competition between the platforms isn't as close. The number of Turkish channels on Twitch is gradually declining: there were up to 9K streaming channels daily in February, and the number did not exceed 7.5K in March. The number of Turkish Kick channels has slightly increased, but not as significantly as the watch time.
Many Turkish Twitch streamers have begun broadcasting on Kick. Among them are Elraenn, cordiseps, rraenee, eray, and jahrein: they used to attract tens of thousands of viewers on Twitch, and now they continue to do so on Kick.
In March 2024, the most popular Turkish streamer on Kick was Elraenn, who gathered around 32K Peak Viewers on March 19th. Interestingly, he had a similar peak viewership on Twitch over the past few months — ranging from 30K to 40K concurrent viewers. Elraenn is the largest Turkish Twitch streamer, with his channel boasting 4.6M followers and a record high of 168K concurrent viewers.
Cordiseps and rraenee also made it to the top three in peak viewership for March, with 22K and 20K Peak Viewers, respectively. Both streamers started broadcasting on Kick only this month.
