Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 482 posts

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#111

Post by jjulius »

londons_explore wrote: post #71
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

> Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product. Elon discovered this the hard way.

>... and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence.

Genuinely curious to hear why you think this is the case. It's my anecdotal experience that the average social media company employee is just an average person like you and I, with an average number of followers.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#112

Post by mikeryan »

hot_gril wrote: post #108
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

I imagine live video is a lot more expensive too. Can't just throw that on a CDN. And unlike YT or TikTok videos with sort of a time limit, Twitch streams can run for hours, chewing up bandwidth while so many "viewers" are giving divided attention at best.

You can absolutely throw live video on a CDN at which point the bandwidth cost is the same as on demand video. The real-time encoding costs are the real issue.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#113

Post by nine_zeros »

asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26
raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

Sounds silly. Who's going to save the company during the inevitable outages?

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#114

Post by pygNdoge »

wnevets wrote: post #104
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?

[dead]

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#115

Post by stets »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #4

Hmm, so they’re starting to feel the effects of ZIRP on pause, good. But they’re also still in the mindset that they need to prevent boobs at all costs. Say what you want about the anything, ZIRP being on pause is about the greatest thing going right now. Unless you’re trying to buy a home I guess.

They are preventing boobs? Have you ever taken a look at Twitch's Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches category? They are complicit in encouraging showing boobs

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#116

Post by nateglims »

niceice wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak. A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong. EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.

What's "late-stage capitalism"?

Originally, it's the idea that capitalism will have a terminal crisis (i.e. die off) and we are in this final crisis because it will hit a state where productivity cannot be increased and so profit will be too difficult to increase.

In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.

With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.

Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#117

Post by nitwit005 »

verdverm wrote: post #64
asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

I found it to be rather buggy personally, it constantly freezes and needs to be refreshed

The mobile app certainly has problems, but you don't need hundreds of engineers to squash the remaining bugs.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#118

Post by mullingitover »

tiffanyh wrote: post #76

Is Section 174 a driver for these layoffs? It now eliminates the ability for businesses to deduct their R&D expenditures as an expense. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-23-08.pdf

It doesn't eliminate it, just eliminates the ability to realize it 100% up front. Now, it has to be amortized over five years for domestic companies, 15 years for foreign companies.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#119

Post by philwelch »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #97
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost. They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff, and I wouldn’t agree they’ve had “a lot” of downtime. Most of the drop in ad revenue is a consequence of content management decisions that seem to be a matter of principle for the company’s new owner.

It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to eliminate much of their headcount and replace much of the rest.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#120

Post by pygNdoge »

covercash wrote: post #93
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side… They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce b…

[dead]
Post reply on HN