“Lucrative yet destructive”: Coverage of gambling live streams in the media

Introduction

Live streaming, exemplified in most countries by the website Twitch, is primarily associated with the live video broadcast of digital gaming and digital gamers (Johnson, 2024). However, rarely promoted on sites like Twitch, although not difficult to find, are channels where broadcasters (known as “streamers”) are instead streaming their digital gambling activities. Viewers of these channels are typically presented with a live screen capture of the streamer’s computer, generally showing an online slots site – though also sometimes online blackjack, other casino games, or poker – and in most cases a webcam. In these broadcasts viewers observe the real-money gambling practises of others, seeing their successes, their failures, their wins and losses, and very importantly, the emotional and affective and embodied responses to those events (Jodén and Strandell, 2022; Woodcock and Johnson, 2019a). This dimension is familiar in studies of “influencers” (Abidin, 2016) and “content creators” (Zhang and Wu, 2022), who are noteworthy online individuals able to accrue significant followings on the basis of their videos, other posted material, opinions and perspectives, and an ability to engage and entertain audiences, often across multiple social media platforms (Glatt, 2022; Johnson, 2024). While the definitions and relationships between influencers and content creators are complex, research supports an argument that the more successful live streamers can indeed be understood as influencers (Sixto-García and Losada-Fernández, 2023; Woodcock and Johnson, 2019b), and so we proceed from that basis in this paper – especially relevant in light of recent research supporting a hypothesis that gambling streamers do, indeed, make their viewers more likely to gamble (Johnson and Jackson, 2025; Wu et al., 2024).

Gambling live streaming specifically is therefore important because it marks a wholly novel intersection between two important and well-studied online phenomena – online and digital gambling, and influencer culture. Given its contemporary nature, very few externally-reviewed publications have so far addressed these gambling videos. Wu et al. (2024: 975) stress that gambling live streams are “exciting” to watch, because “streamers broadcast themselves engaging in intense forms of gambling, such as placing high-stake bets, receiving jackpot wins, and suffering heavy losses”. Johnson and Jackson (2025: 11) similarly state that we must strongly “consider the appeal that influencers and ‘content creators’ have for their fans and how exciting their activities can easily seem” when it comes to understanding the allure of online gambling content of this type. Hoebanx and French (2023: 66), meanwhile, have rightly called gambling videos an “under-regulated media”, arguing that user-created videos are increasingly becoming “a form of diffusion of gambling mechanics beyond traditional gambling venues” – and thus important to address. A fourth publication in this area notes the presence of other live streams which are not focused on gambling content, but nevertheless might integrate gambling mini games, or offer lotteries or other gambling style competitions to their viewers (Abarbanel and Johnson, 2020). These interventions have laid important groundwork and identified the importance of getting to grips with this online phenomenon, but we presently know nothing about another vital aspect of gambling live streaming – specifically, how this novel and emerging practice is being discussed, framed, and articulated, in the media. Answering this question for the first time is the goal of this paper.

News coverage communicates how technologies and practices around them are situated within society. News media have long been a key source of political information (Terkildsen and Schnell, 1997) and play a significant role in the shaping of public opinion regarding issues of debate and controversy (Haynes et al., 2016). Journalists and journalistic outlets make decisions about which details to emphasise and which ones to downplay or ignore, and these influence what publics learn and, potentially, how they feel about the subject matter (Chong and Druckman, 2007; Entman, 1993; McCombs, 2004). In the case of online gambling, Berzovan et al. (2025) observe that media framing also often influences legislation, regulation, and commercial practices. As the “expansion of Internet gambling” continues to “outpac[e] peoples’ understanding[s] of the phenomenon” (Wood and Williams, 2009: 6), it is all the more important to understand what information is being distributed on a novel phenomenon like gambling live streaming, and hence what information is shaping public understanding. Much work has indeed been done to date analysing news media framings of gambling (e.g. Miller et al., 2014; Reith and Wardle, 2022) and gaming as well (e.g. McKernan, 2013; Williams, 2003), as well as coverage of influencers and influencer culture (e.g. Droz-dit-Busset, 2022).

Gambling live streams, however, represent a wholly new practice, existing at an intersection between these topics – and it is these we therefore explore for the first time in this paper, through a content analysis of 120 news stories from 2018 to 2024 which addressed gambling live streaming. Our goal here is therefore not to assess or critique the quality or accuracy of this coverage – although we will of course compare against research findings when appropriate to shed further light on a particular idea – but rather to contribute a clear understanding of how this topic is being framed and presented as a matter for public concern. We find that while coverage in many ways draws on existing framings of gambling, it is complicated by journalists including many other domains as well (e.g. social media, gaming, and of course influencers) – thus framing gambling live streaming as something not simply reducible to gambling itself. In doing so the work demonstrates that potential future approaches to gambling live stream regulation might take different paths – for example, those more traditionally associated with platform regulation – from those ordinarily pursued with gambling, and more broadly reveals that new gambling phenomena are not always presented in journalistic work solely through existing tropes of gambling, but in ways that do acknowledge their complexities. At a moment where gamblification (Macey and Hamari, 2024) is a major online trend, this is an important broader finding that may also shape future journalistic framings of such phenomena – including future ones we cannot yet anticipate.

Existing research

Live streaming has emerged in the past decade as a major online media industry. Twitch, in most countries the dominant market leader, is one of the fifty most visited websites in the world. The site is primarily associated with games and gaming (Johnson, 2024; Taylor, 2018), while non-gaming content includes “Just Chatting” streams where broadcasters host conversations with their viewers about a range of topics including current affairs, or mental health and wellbeing. Other live streams are creative, foregrounding artistic works, writing, programming, and things of this nature, and some streamers broadcast themselves at real-life events such as music concerts, or in restaurants or shops. The (growing) prominence of non-gaming content on Twitch is shared by other platforms like YouTube and TikTok, but relative newcomer to the livestreaming scene, Kick, hosts content focused heavily on gaming, as well as on gambling. Kick has seen essentially no scholarship to date but is a key player in the gambling live streaming scene that we examine here. The site is framed as a less regulated alternative to Twitch, thereby engaging with alt-right and far right discourses about “free speech” (Browning, 2023) while also sitting within a border nexus of start-up culture, cryptocurrency, and gaming, as well as Kick’s sharply reactionary ideological stance. These factors between them have generated a toxic technoculture (Massanari, 2017) on the platform which has only begun to see study, but this smaller site’s strong and growing associations with gambling make it, alongside Twitch – much larger and containing some gambling content, but without any emphasis on gambling – the two most essential places to study when it comes to gambling live streams.

Focusing via coverage of these sites on the emerging media framings of what gambling live streams are, and why this subject matters, is the goal of this paper. Many media theorists adopt the concept of frames to explain and understand the effects of media editorial judgement on public perceptions of contemporary phenomena. Initially developed by Goffman (1974), frames are cognitive structures that individuals use to make sense of the world around them. Framings and discourses establish one’s “understanding of the nature of specific issues” (Francis and Livingstone, 2021: 212) and are thus “never neutral” (Van Hulst et al., 2025: 79) – even if ostensibly intended to be by their creators. A frame can therefore be seen as that which is used to “define a situation, to define the issues, and to set the terms of a debate” (Tankard, 2001: 96); that which determines “how are issues constructed, discourse structured, and meanings developed” (Reese, 2001: 7); or simply the presented “definition” of an “issue or situation” (Van Hulst et al., 2025: 79). The power of framing is thus found its “ability to define the terms of a debate” without others necessarily noticing this is taking place (Tankard, 2001: 97), and as a result, studying framing therefore helps us to understand how concepts and language are “used strategically to frame a particular topic” (Lindekilde, 2014: 200). Discourse analysis and framing analysis do belong to the same “family of analytical frameworks” (Lindekilde, 2014: 196), but whereas discourse analysis focuses on hegemonic and dominant discursive structures, framing analysis looks at meaning construction (Van Hulst et al., 2025: 74) – in this case, what is the meaning of gambling live streaming as a phenomenon, as constructed through journalistic work?

This is a useful enquiry because news media use frames to convey information, promote certain interpretations or solutions to issues, and otherwise attempt to guide perceptions of particular topics (Entman, 1993; McGinty et al., 2019). This makes journalists an important source of framing for public issues (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 55) and of positive and negative valorization of contentious topics (Lindekilde, 2014: 200). They set the tone for a phenomenon by “the choice of frames” (Tankard, 2001: 98) in their writing or reporting, which is why framing analysis has indeed often been used in examining news materials to understand how contemporary topics are presented in public discussion (van Dijk, 2023: 151). Framing analysis allows us to examine how news reporting connects new phenomena or events to existing ones in readers’ minds, and is particularly valuable when we consider the legitimacy that journalists possess as speakers to fact, reality, and current events (Humphreys, 2010: 491). News stories and journalistic work can deploy many kinds of rhetorical techniques (McMullan and Mullen, 2001: 324) by which frames are emphasised and others not mentioned, and in doing so shape the way opinion on a topic is formed. Framing analysis is thus distinct from discourse analysis or content analysis by understanding news texts as items that interact with individuals’ existing understandings of phenomena (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 58), and by focusing on how “ideas, culture and ideology” are combined with “certain situations or empirical phenomena” – gambling live streaming – to create ways that the world is understood by readers (Lindekilde, 2014: 196).

Coming now to our specific enquiry, we note that given how little research exists on this cutting-edge phenomenon, existing scholarship has not yet considered it from a framing analysis point of view. Framing analysis has long been an important part of understanding contemporary gambling practices and the contemporary gambling industry as a whole, however, which immediately highlights the value of treating this new practice in the same manner and comparing and contrasting it against other gambling phenomena. Gambling is a common topic in news and newspapers (McMullan and Mullen, 2001: 321–322) and the press is understood to shape how we think about gambling certainly as much as other elements of popular culture or advertising (Borch, 2012: 55). Responsible gambling itself has indeed been studied as a discourse and framing (Livingstone and Rintoul, 2020), showing the use of this approach to gambling as a topic area. Of particular note is how the gambling sector in the past few decades has successfully carried off the “feat” (Francis and Livingstone, 2021: 212) of normalizing the practice into a form of everyday entertainment, and this contemporary and highly pervasive framing of gambling as “innocent” (Borch, 2012: 58) entertainment (Miller et al., 2016: 172; cf. McMullan and Mullen, 2001: 322) is an important antecedent to our own study. Such a framing is of course generally being applied when used to the play of gambling – but what about its spectating? Scholarship has found that even an imagined presence of others affects how people gamble (Rockloff, 2004), and live streaming takes this out of a context of possibility and into a reality with tens, hundreds, or even thousands or more spectators tuning in to watch a gambler play. This is an extremely novel and contemporary development that has become large enough to gather mainstream interest from journalists – but how is the topic being framed? For the reader who knows nothing of gambling live streaming, videos, or influencers or content creators, how will these be inserted into their understanding of the world? Hence, rather than focusing on gambling behaviour – which gambling studies tend to prioritise – we are instead focusing on the “social structures” that inform and shape this gambling phenomenon and its reception (Borch, 2012: 55) – in this case, journalism.

Considering such questions for a novel sociotechnical practice is not a new approach for research to take, though our case study of gambling live streaming is a wholly new case study with which to ask them. Emerging technologies or practices are always subject to social construction via frames, as their meanings are constantly contested and renegotiated by various voices across society (McKernan, 2013). For example, Miller et al.’s (2014) study of “problem gambling” coverage found outlets discuss solutions to the issue more often than causes or consequences for those affected, emphasizing politics over communities and health outcomes. Media attention has also, historically, been central to the formation of mythologies and moral concerns around gambling (McMullan and Mullen, 2001). News media can thus influence perceptions of these activities and notions of what is (un)desirable about them and how (if at all) individuals should respond to or interact with them (Reith and Wardle, 2022). Public framings of a consumption practice can shape the acceptance (or not) of that practice (Humphreys, 2010: 490), and journalists can play an important role as a result of their legitimacy to speak with perceived objectivity on important topics, and hence their role in “shaping public debate” around issues (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 69). It is therefore important that we build an understanding of exactly how gambling live streaming is being framed, and hence potential ramifications on the ongoing social construction of the practice. It is new, rapidly growing, and potentially impactful on viewers’ lives, and therefore looks set to become a major area of discussion in and around gambling in the coming years. Gambling live streams’ status as a highly contemporary and – as we show – highly controversial form of online content makes them important to bring into scholarship surrounding gambling’s embedding into (or resistance from) contemporary societies, and how journalistic framing shapes and influences this process.

Methodology

There are already hundreds of news stories on gambling live streams across both mainstream and specialist presses. The fact that any are in the mainstream press at all demonstrates that this may be emerging as an area of interest to the wider public, while the predominance of specialist presses demonstrate that this practice is getting significant attention in gambling, gaming, and tech circles – which are not small audiences in their own rights. To conduct our study of gambling live stream news stores and coverage we used three databases – ProQuest, Gale, and Factiva – on which we searched for “(stake.com OR stake.us) AND Australia AND gambl* AND (Twitch OR Kick OR stream*) and (Twitch or Kick) and gambl*”. The first of these searches reflected the fact this project was funded by an Australian grant and thus needed to reflect any commentary here that specifically addressed the Australian context, but was also highly relevant for other reasons as well. Australians are amongst the highest gamblers on the planet (Sullivan, 2024), and Kick is led in part by an Australian owner (Whittaker, 2025), with online cryptocurrency casinos Stake.com and Stake.us also being Australian-owned services connected to the ownership of Kick and thus in the phenomenon of gambling live streaming. The second search term, by contrast, was kept as wide as possible with the goal of capturing any mention of gambling on Twitch and Kick, and to secure a broader global perspective on the same issue (since these are global platforms, with viewers from almost every country on the planet). We elected to focus on articles over a 6-year period, starting from 2018 and ending with the project’s completion in October 2024.

To these articles we also added those from a Google search using the keywords “gambling”, “Twitch”, and “Kick”, to catch any missed by the above databases. Once these were all collected, we first took stock of the 120-article dataset that had been acquired. There was significant variation by country across the collected articles, with 40 of the stories being from outlets based in the United States; 23 from the United Kingdom; 20 from Australia; 11 from Bangladesh; 8 from India; and the remaining (all below 5) from Canada, the EU, Hungary, Malawi, Malta, Thailand, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. With Twitch based in the United States and Kick based in Australia, these were unsurprisingly near the top of the list, although we had not anticipated seeing particular interest from the Indian subcontinent on this topic. Outlets collected in this search were a mix of types, including major global newspapers such as The Guardian and the New York Times, local newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) or the Chiang Rai Times (Thailand), tech sites such as The Verge and Dexerto, and a handful from gambling-related news and commentary sites such as PokerNews and Blockonomi. This variety demonstrates both that this is an area of interest for specialist outlets – gaming, tech, gambling, and so forth – but also mainstream outlets as well, and across a broad geographical spread. In terms of publication date, 71 (a little over half) of the articles collected were from 2023; 24 were from 2024, and 23 from 2022; and only one from 2018 and one from 2021. It was 2022 and 2023 when the controversy around these broadcasts peaked on Twitch (before the site took some action to partially limit their scope ¹ ) and so these are unsurprising, but the phenomenon remains visible in public attention as demonstrated by the 2024 data, and – although outside of our dataset – a momentary search shows just as much attention being paid to the topic in 2025 as well.

Once collected and categorised, these materials (to which we assigned numbers between 1 and 120) were subjected to thematic analysis (Cain et al., 2017; Huang and Loo, 2023; Kersbergen et al., 2022). We began by identifying the topics discussed in each article – since some of them covered issues that were only raised once (e.g. a specific national context) we focused our coding on regularly-occurring ideas that were found. Coding was inductive in nature and we proceeded without any assumptions about what sort of issues would be addressed or discussed in this news coverage. We sought common points of discussion, topics which appeared regularly, and particular framings or perspectives which repeated themselves. These would all be able to point us towards an understanding of how gambling live streaming is being mediated and understood by the press, and hence how it is being understood by the average person getting their information about this novel phenomenon through such journalistic and commentary sources. The dataset was coded and double-checked by the third and first authors, and this initial process led to 21 codes in total where a topic or subject was mentioned more than once, with the least common recurring code appearing in only 2 of the 120 articles and the most common code appearing in 48 of the 120 articles. The fact even the most common code appeared in below half of the sample showed that although these articles are all discussing gambling live streams and video content, and more broadly sometimes gambling influencers and content creators, the specific focuses are diverse. This is a key finding we explore in this paper, and highlights the connections this area has to many different news interests and to many other contemporary online phenomena – and thus cannot simply be reduced to coverage of “gambling”, or even “online gambling”. Although the coding process was inductive, it was of course anticipated that some topics would be likely to arise, such as discussion of Kick’s connection to gambling site Stake, for example, or the increasing blurring of lines between gambling, social media, and digital games. These did indeed appear, but others were less predictable. For example, we were surprised to see 18 of the 120 sample discussing issues around labour and work sustainability on live streaming sites (see Johnson and Woodcock, 2017), which are issues that certainly apply to all streamers – not just those producing gambling-related material.

Our coding process led to three major themes which were consistent across all kinds of outlets – the importance of considering this phenomenon in the context of children and teenagers, the possibility of addiction from their viewing (and their play by streamers), and questions and challenges around legislation and regulation. Each of these themes had a primary code which was the same as the theme and directly reflected in around a quarter of the articles each (30, 28, and 39 respectively), all of which were themselves amongst the largest codes, but were distinguished by having also a number of additional codes which were often associated with those themes. For example, discussion of the Stake.com cryptocurrency casino, whose ownership is related to that of Kick, and Stake’s owner Ed Craven, was often invoked in discussion of the legislative and regulatory questions posed by these broadcasts. In total 98 of the 120 articles had at least one code within the three key themes (see Table 1 below), demonstrating the representativeness and importance of these three dominant themes, and hence the emergence of three very distinct and clear dominant frames coming into being about the phenomenon.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Breakdown of themes, codes, and number of articles in each theme.

Theme	Main code and # of articles	Related codes and # of articles
Young people	Young people (30)	Lack of age gating in gambling streams (7), blurring of video gaming and gambling (5)
Addiction	Addiction (29)	Viewer interest in gambling streams (20)
Legislation/regulation	Legislation/regulation (39)	Legal status of the cryptocurrency casinos they stream (12), Twitch policies and rules (39), Kick policies and rules (13), discussion of Stake and Ed Craven (48)

In the following discussion we therefore centre our analyses around each of these three themes in turn, drawing mostly from its primary code but also from related codes and occasionally other articles where useful. Our goal is not to pass judgement on reporting quality, but rather to identify repeated framings and perspectives being used to explain this phenomenon to readers, and being used to situate it often within other debates, issues, and contemporary phenomena. To do so we draw on direct quotes extensively and thus note that these quotes are, of course, not inherently indicative of factual correctness, but rather the creation and emergence of frames, discourses, and primary concerns around the issues at play. Across these themes we thus found three major frames emerging in discussion of this phenomenon, but also the entanglement of these frames with other topics including, as previously noted, the ongoing gaming-gambling convergence, major internet platforms, social media, influencer experiences and lifestyles, and other topics. These collectively demonstrate for the first time how gambling streamers and content creators are emerging as a distinct topic for public interest and concern, but also their emergence as one factor amongst many in a rapidly-changing digital ecosystem, leading to their framing in ways somewhat like, and somewhat unlike, traditional gambling. This is an area that is likely to continue to draw attention, especially at a moment of increasing interest in platform regulation in Europe, the social media legislation now emerging in Australia (Cover et al., 2025; Taylor, 2025), similar legislation being considered in the United Kingdom (McCallum, 2026), and so forth. It is hence a valuable moment to understand how new gambling-related phenomena become framed in the media, especially when gambling live streamers and influencers, gaming-gambling convergence in digital games, the staggeringly rapid rise of offshore cryptocurrency casinos, and many other similar, fast-moving, and singular, trends, are all coming into being with striking speed and little to no regulatory oversight.

Discussion

Conclusion

In this paper we have examined 120 news stories from recent years that cover the novel phenomenon of gambling live streams – live broadcasts, over the web, of real-money gambling play, most often hosted by “influencers” or “content creators”, or those aspiring to reach such a status. From these stories we have identified three dominant themes in the popular and journalistic framing of gambling live streams at the present moment. In doing so our study demonstrates that journalists are moving beyond gambling per se to draw on many other social, cultural, and economic domains to present this phenomenon and to acknowledge its complexity, even while that might carry risks of losing readers with less knowledge of these other domains, or little knowledge of one of several domains being addressed. Examining each of these has offered valuable insights into how this phenomenon is being framed in a range of different ways (cf. Tankard, 2001: 96), and what groundwork is being tacitly laid for potential interventions in the future, in ways that both resemble framings common to existing gambling products and services to some degree, but also exhibit unique associations – influencers, social media, platforms, gaming, cryptocurrency, and much else – which complicate the picture. They also collectively represent something which has its own importance in the broader political arena of the current moment. Specifically, finding such a high degree of coverage of the phenomenon also shows that the practice is being taken seriously, which we believe is a very positive development. When critiques are increasingly growing around the powerful roles played by social media influencers (Aarons, 2025) in the psychological and sociological shaping of young people, especially young men (Renström and Bäck, 2024; Wescott et al., 2024), it is important to bring to public attention that these negative influences are not just ideological, but they might also be increasingly financial as well. Not only might viewers potentially spend money on donations that support the gambling habits of live streamers, but such channels normalise gambling as a way to potentially “make money”, all while these streamers sometimes create massive fanbases who might seek to emulate the high-stakes lifestyles of these individuals.

These findings also enable us to identify vectors – such as young people, risks of addiction, and illegality and legislation – that seem extremely likely to represent the foundations of future attention, and potentially interventions. It is interesting to compare these to scholarship on what drives young people towards gambling itself, such as “entertainment, excitement and the possibility of winning money” (Messerlian et al., 2004: 4) – all are important, but the first two would strike us as central to the live streaming context. Live streams are entertaining places, and when something is at stake, can easily become exciting as well (Jackson, 2023). This brings to the foreground what it is that makes gambling live streams novel and thus important to address – they bring the entertaining and exciting qualities of live streaming, and of watching videos and video content more generally, into a gambling context – and do so, largely, for the first time. ³ Such overlap is highly novel, important to understand (Abarbanel and Johnson, 2020; Hoebanx and French, 2023; Johnson and Jackson, 2025; Wu et al., 2024), and evidently of interest to news media – and potentially, in coming years, to legislators and regulatory bodies as well. At a moment when Australia has enacted world-first legislation designed to limit young people’s access to online content deemed problematic (Livingstone, 2026; Prendergast and Dyer, 2026), the United Kingdom is considering following suit (Topping, 2026), and the European Union is pushing back strongly against the power of major platforms (O’Carroll, 2026), such framings becoming dominant in wider discourse will likely shape how gambling content, alongside gambling itself, will become addressed within such regulatory contexts. In particular, concern for young people and concern over illegal material are both prominent in such discussions at present – and in these framings of gambling live streams. By contrast, addiction seems unlikely to lead a legislative charge precisely because it is the streamers, not the viewers, who are becoming associated with this particular risk. This study therefore shows us that gambling-related content, such as videos, might not be addressed from quite the same directions as gambling itself, despite similar themes appearing in journalistic coverage of both.

This project’s findings can also be usefully positioned within existing research on framings and discourses surrounding gambling, influencers and content creators, and emerging technological practices. For example, Francis and Livingstone (2021: 214) recently noted that contemporary gambling legislation tends to focus on three things – protecting young people, addressing problem gambling, and regulating illegal activity – and these were the three frames most clearly expressed in our dataset, even if our themes adopted slightly different labels. These three classic perspectives are thus already emerging as “diagnostic” frames for gambling live streaming much like gambling itself. Yet there are complexities found here which are not found in those three themes – issues around the power of major online platforms, the rise of social media influencers, and live streaming’s relationship with digital gaming. These were prominent in our dataset and often served as additional important elements of these news stories, combining with these three more prominent themes to offer nuance and detail, and highlight what is specific to gambling live streaming compared to gambling per se. The three main approaches are being deployed in understanding gambling streamers are in line with the framing of gambling itself, but the secondary connections and relationships being foregrounded within these themes are highly distinct. There is also another difference this study brings to the fore, which is that while corporate and industrial gambling interests often shape news coverage and commentary about gambling (McMullan and Mullen, 2001), here, however – perhaps of the novelty of the domain, or because the gambling sector doesn’t want to be explicitly associated with the gambling influencers and streamers they support, precisely for fear of bringing government interest – the opposite is the case. The gambling industry seems to have made no real comment about individuals so far, whether in our dataset or otherwise, even though these individuals have emerged as a major and important aspect of their advertising regimes at the present moment – even if these rarely count as “advertising” in strict legal senses in most regulatory contexts. The study thus demonstrates that the emerging framings of gambling live streams draw much from the framing of gambling itself, helping us to identify potential future vectors of interest and regulatory attention, but also cannot be reduced to such – they also feature distinct elements not found elsewhere in comparable discussions, and which have not previously been addressed in studying news coverage of gambling.

Ultimately, framing analysis is an effective tool when looking to “analyze processes of meaning-making” (Van Hulst et al., 2025: 79), and we have learned much from this study about the ongoing construction of public debate and awareness around gambling live streaming, and how a “dynamic relationship” between these journalistic texts and “their wider social, cultural, and political context” (Lindekilde, 2014: 208) frames gambling live streaming in various ways likely to be familiar already to a reader – but not solely in terms related to gambling itself. It also, however, suggests key directions for future scholarship into gambling live streaming and related areas. Firstly, it is clear that just as major web platforms have seen focused study already – such as Twitch and others – Kick is increasingly becoming important and prominent enough to demand specific scholarly attention. Our study demonstrated that this is a platform at the heart of the questions and challenges posed by gambling live streaming. Secondly, across all sites hosting this kind of content, it will also be extremely important to develop a focus for attention on gambling live streamers themselves. The research project this paper is a publication from did in fact attempt to interview gambling live streamers themselves, but this population was found to be very reclusive and sometimes even highly hostile and aggressive when sent interview requests. After this emerged as a consistent theme, we concluded that gambling live streamers’ reluctance to talk likely stemmed from tacit acknowledgement about the controversial nature of the practice – an implicit admission which itself only further demonstrates the importance of reaching, and understanding, this population. Doing so will allow us to capture the perspectives of gambling live stream creators on the main topics covered in this paper, which are vital given that these are the people producing the content in question. Lastly, future research will also need to focus ever more closely on the possible effects that watching gambling live streams might have on viewers. The current data here is equivocal and complex (Johnson and Jackson, 2025) and much more needs to be known. Nevertheless, gambling live streaming and online gambling video content appear to be here to stay, and that means we need to understand as much as we can about them: who produces them and why, who watches them, and why, and as we have considered in this paper, who talks about them in public, and how – and what this might mean for the future of the practice, as it slowly comes to wider public, and likely policymaker, attention.