From YouTube to Kick: How Ilyas El Maliki Became One of Kick’s Biggest Streamers

In the spring of 2023, Ilyas El Maliki was the most-watched streamer on YouTube Gaming. By the summer, he had signed with Kick, a platform that was less than a year old. It turned out to be the stage for the biggest moments of his career.

Top of YouTube

Between January and March 2023, Streams Charts ranked Ilyas first among all YouTube Gaming streamers, with more than 8.9 million hours watched, ahead of IShowSpeed and TimTheTatman. We break those numbers down in Number One on YouTube Gaming.

A new platform courting streamers

Kick launched at the end of 2022 and spent 2023 trying to pull creators away from Twitch. Its main argument was money: streamers keep 95% of their subscription revenue on Kick, where Twitch’s standard split is 50/50. That summer, TechCrunch reported that xQc had signed a reported $100 million non-exclusive deal with the platform, and names like Amouranth and Hikaru Nakamura announced they were joining.

The signing: July 2023

On 26 July 2023, Kick’s Arabic account posted a teaser: “Exciting news coming soon, God willing 👀💚”. Soon after, Ilyas shared a photo on Instagram showing himself signing a contract with Kick. Kick’s official account replied with a welcome message and shared his post. The Moroccan gaming outlet Lgaming asked whether he had just become the first Moroccan streamer to sign with Kick. No terms were reported.

His first stream on the platform said a lot about why he went: a watch party of Real Madrid vs Barcelona, the kind of stream YouTube does not allow. Freedom of format came up again later. In May 2025, the Arabic site Amnay Mag wrote that Ilyas wanted more freedom than YouTube gave him, and had had problems with YouTube removing ads from his videos.

A year away, then second place

The move did not lead to a non-stop run. Streams Charts reports that Ilyas spent nearly a year away from Kick before returning in August 2024. His comeback was immediate: in September 2024, his first full month back, he finished second on Kick’s monthly leaderboard, behind only Adin Ross.

In its review of Kick’s second year, published in December 2024, Streams Charts singled out Arabic-speaking signings like Ilyas, who had “quickly gained hundreds of thousands of Followers”. Kick’s overall viewership grew 142% that year.

Kick was also where his next chapter began. On 7 October 2024, while he was live on Kick, Gerard Piqué sent him an invitation to the Kings World Cup Nations.

601,000 viewers

That invitation led to the biggest stream of his career. During Morocco’s run at the Kings World Cup Nations in January 2025, his channel reached 601,000 concurrent viewers on 10 January 2025, according to Streams Charts. In Streams Charts’ review of 2025, that was the third-highest peak of any streamer on Kick that year, behind only WestCOL and ElZeein. The full story is in Morocco at the Kings League.

A month later, Kick hosted another milestone: Ilyas and Piqué announced Ultra Chmicha, his own Kings League club, on a live stream watched by more than half a million people.

Where he stands today

Ilyas is now one of the most-followed streamers on the platform: Dexerto’s list of the most-followed Kick channels, updated in September 2026, places him among the top 20 worldwide. For his current follower count and whether he is streaming right now, see Is Ilyas live?, where this site tracks his Kick channel around the clock.