Kick believes its new ads can be a “direct line to Gen Z”

On Kick, it’s time for a commercial break.

The streaming platform affiliated with Stake.com has officially launched ads on its live broadcasts. Nearly four years after its initial launch, Kick is introducing a revenue stream that has the potential to benefit creators and brands alike.

Early on, Kick eschewed ads. Creator monetization came in the form of an incentive program that scaled with watch time and smaller prize pools catered to homegrown talent.

As Kick grew, however, the eventual arrival of interruptive ads became an inevitability. Last December, Kick CEO Ed Craven confirmed that his company would introduce ads “at some point” in the future. “Enjoy the ad-free experience while it lasts,” Craven said.

Now, Kick ads are here, and they are arriving amid a pivotal moment. Kick is attracting millions of concurrent viewers on its biggest streams while hauling in more than 300 million hours of monthly watch time. The post announcing Kick ads notes that the platform now has more than 100 million active users.

That’s a lot of impressionable viewers, and 81% of them are between the ages of 18 and 34. Kick is making the argument others have made in the past by claiming that its ads can connect brands to hard-to-reach members of the Gen Z cohort.

“The viewer is everything on KICK. They’re not watching in the background, they’re in the chat, part of the stream,” said Kick Head of Growth and Revenue Ryan Webb in a statement. “We spent more than three years earning that by building a platform creators wanted to stream on and communities wanted to spend time in.”

Now that Kick has ads, however, it will have to deal with the same challenges that have caused headaches on other streaming platforms. Twitch, for example, has been compelled to give streamers more control over ad breaks while managing the overall length of those interruptions. YouTube, on the other hand, has experimented with ad formats that are less intrusive for users.

For now, Kick’s response to potential roadblocks is to wait and see. It wants creators to report inappropriate ads, but it is also telling them to expect variable break lengths. Its solution for poorly-timed interruptions is the stream rewind feature it introduced last year.

Kick may need to develop more sophisticated ad policies in the future, but the gold rush will come first. Creators have commanded millions of hours of attention on Kick. Now, we’ll learn how much that attention is really worth.