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Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up

YouTube, Kick offered multimillion-dollar deals but viewers didn’t necessarily follow.

Kris Lamberson came back to Twitch after earning ‘generational wealth’ at YouTube

Photographer: Robin L Marshall/Getty Images
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Video-game influencers are returning to Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch en masse after seven- or eight-figure deals to livestream exclusively on other platforms ended.

More than a half-dozen high-profile livestreamers started broadcasting solely on Twitch last year after contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and the upstart Kick streaming platform expired. The gaming celebrities returned to a combined 25 million Twitch followers, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News. Several more are livestreaming simultaneously across multiple platforms — not just the one they were contracted to.