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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

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

#131

Post by nathants »

lchengify wrote: post #109
wnevets wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am supremely curious about this myself. My guess would be their ad spend is bad in comparison to the other networks (Google, Facebook, TikTok). Could be because their audience isn't worth as much, could be because the ad formats are bad, could be because they can't get advertisers. But unless they are serving ads from Google's network, my guess is they are 4th place at best. As noted on other threads, their streami…

kick.com is trying to run a clone of twitch on aws for a while now. too soon to tell.

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

#132

Post by philwelch »

echelon wrote: post #83
joegibbs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the ad policy?

You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis. Is it exploitative? Empowering? Toxic? Who knows! Everyone argues about everything. Twitch is ban happy with anything even remotely controversial. Things that can be suggestive or comments that can be interpreted as offensive will garner a ban. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related. Honestly, this…

> You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis…. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.

It seems incomplete to complain about this without also noting that Twitch (along with almost every other social media platform) has increasingly turned into a lead generation platform for OnlyFans. The rules keep changing because the OnlyFans streamers will find whatever line is drawn and absolutely spam the platform with whatever drives traffic to OF.

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

#133

Post by TheRealPomax »

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?

Live streaming 1080p 60fps video to a channel with even just a few hundred viewers is a staggering amount of data that you need to push out. Multiply that by thousands of simultaneous streams, and the numbers don't look good. Because even though "Amazon" might be able to afford to send out all that data, "a subdivision owned by Amazon" still has to balance the budget and show that it can cover the cost for its slice of the pie... and Twitch simply can't.

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

#134

Post by symlinkk »

jron wrote: post #122

I frequently kept a twitch pop-out in the corner of my screen throughout the day. When uBlock stopped working, I almost immediately stopped using the site. Video interruptions are pretty awful for live content where channel switching is a regular occurrence.

Sounds like a win for Twitch - you were costing them money and not giving anything back

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

#135

Post by goeiedaggoeie »

mikeryan wrote: post #112
hot_gril wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cache TTL on VOD is significantly higher, so your whole infrastructure needs to have a live origin, which gets hit repeatedly to get the latest fragments/segments from the origin, from multiple edges/midgresses. I find that our origin consumes an order of magnitude more CPU than transcoding and packaging for live once you have even a couple of thousand live viewers and when serving LL-HLS/ll-dash with a low fragment size it increases more. if you are latency sensitive then i between caching layers are not an option.

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

#136

Post by lgkk »

Maybe this will be a good time to remove the X rated and otherwise gross content (there are other sites for this kind of stuff) and focus on the core experience.

Just kidding. They will probably double down on it and make it a onlyfans lite.

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

#137

Post by stock_toaster »

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

I wondered about this as well.

Another article I ran across: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

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

#138

Post by pugworthy »

jron wrote: post #122

I frequently kept a twitch pop-out in the corner of my screen throughout the day. When uBlock stopped working, I almost immediately stopped using the site. Video interruptions are pretty awful for live content where channel switching is a regular occurrence.

That's why you subscribe to the channel you like - or use Twitch Prime if you have Prime.

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

#139

Post by paxys »

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…

It's just a brutal space to operate in. Even YouTube barely manages to break even.
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