Every 10 minutes, KickStatz asks Kick’s public API for every live stream. For each one it gets who is streaming, the category and language, and how many people are watching. Each of these checks is called a sweep. Every figure on the site comes from the sweeps. Each page says when the latest sweep ran, and warns you if the sweeps are running late.
When no viewer count is shown
Some live streams come back from Kick with a viewer count of 0. Streamers can hide their count on Kick, and a stream may also have nobody watching; the API doesn’t say which. KickStatz never shows these as “0 viewers”. It marks them “not shown”, leaves them out of rankings and averages, and counts them separately on the home page.
Peak, average, stream length and watched hours
- Peak is the highest viewer count any sweep saw during the stream.
- Average is the mean of the viewer counts the sweeps saw, counting only sweeps where a count was shown.
- Live for (the stream’s length) runs from Kick’s start time to the last sweep that saw the stream. A stream that has ended stopped somewhere in the 10 minutes after that, so its length is marked ≈.
- Watched hours is the average multiplied by the length in hours.
Because a sweep is a snapshot every 10 minutes, a short spike between two sweeps can be missed. Kick’s own dashboard doesn’t depend on KickStatz’s sweeps, so its figures can differ a little.
Which streams are kept
While a stream is live, KickStatz tracks it. When it ends, its figures are kept if it reached 5 or more viewers, or if someone has looked the channel up on KickStatz. Once a channel is looked up, every stream it makes is kept, however small it is.
Category competition
For each category, KickStatz takes the viewers of everyone live in it and removes the 5 biggest streams. Share what is left across the other channels, and you get left per channel. It is roughly how many viewers there are to win for a channel outside the 5 biggest.
Categories with 10 or more live channels get a rating. A category is only compared with others of a similar size, so a huge category isn’t rated against a niche one. There are three sizes: 10 to 49 live channels, 50 to 199, and 200 or more. Within each size, the categories are put in order of left per channel and split into four equal groups. The top quarter, with the most to go round, is Easy. Next come Medium and Hard, and the bottom quarter is Saturated. The groups are worked out again in every sweep, so a rating reflects Kick at that moment.
Subscribers and followers
A channel’s active subscribers come from Kick’s public channel data. KickStatz asks Kick when the page is opened and reuses the answer for up to 15 minutes. Followers aren’t shown, because Kick’s public API doesn’t include a follower count.