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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

#151

Post by prox »

ctroein89 wrote: post #124
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?

Video is expensive, and streamers don’t like ads. Amazon has for years been saying that they think that Twitch is under monetized. In their minds, 20% of watch time could be ads, just like regular TV. Streamers don’t like ads: it kills the vibe when your audience gets a 2 minute timeout. So streamers aren’t running enough ad breaks, and try to support themselves via memberships, merch and other alternative monetizati…

It’s too bad they are so unimaginative when it comes to that. I mean at the very least they should hand controls to the streamer to run an ad: right now it’s the algorithm that does it.

Also they should primarily look at other ways to monetize. Subs are still the best way, but not everyone has that kind of money.

One other big problem is that there former heads just didn’t get streamers and they ran a lot of big ones out of the building. One streamer with a crazy amount of paid members was treated poorly in an amateurish way.

I think they have new management now which at least seem to be a bit more in tune with what streamers needs are and some of the painpoints.

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

#152

Post by Spivak »

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…

I think this kind of thing is far far overblown, for the vast majority of streamers these kinds of "internet discourse" dramas don't affect them in any meaningful way. Internet drama is just fuel for the blogspam.

It's all money anything else is rage baiting, kick's pull is the revenue split they'll never be able to maintain if they reach critical mass and the policies that get streamers to leave are the ad/revenue split changes.

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

#153

Post by kevinventullo »

kenhwang wrote: post #148
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've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

Why does “content is essentially free” apply to TikTok and not Twitch?

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

#154

Post by dexwiz »

no_wizard wrote: post #96
dexwiz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line. Jokes on them, that's…

This isn't really correct. While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end u…

The anti work subreddit was founded by people who were truly anti work. It was then co-opted by people in low and middle wage jobs venting about poor working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Its a great example of how moderates sanewash extremist ideas to something a bit more palatable, similar to defund the police. While most people probably want a demilitarization of police forces, some people truly want a policefree state.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

goeiedaggoeie wrote: post #135
mikeryan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fragm…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by ekianjo »

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.

> don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

Usually you dont hire if your business is not working or expected to grow

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

#157

Post by belthesar »

musha68k wrote: post #60
DivisionSol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-... Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive and we have spent significant effort working to reduce these costs so that we could find a way for the Twitch business to remain in Korea. First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have…

Would be interesting to understand how far they got with the p2p experiments.

I've never worked at Twitch, but I have experimented with P2P video delivery, and the TL;DR from my experiments is that real-time video delivery can not easily provide a consistent, low latency experience, and video experience problems amplify quite quickly. I wrote up a fair bit about this in the comments of a different HN post a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=33070218

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

#158

Post by brandensilva »

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

Worse change in startup history while we are in an high borrowing rate in an inflationary environment with limited capital.

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

#159

Post by pclmulqdq »

prox wrote: post #151
ctroein89 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video is expensive, and streamers don’t like ads. Amazon has for years been saying that they think that Twitch is under monetized. In their minds, 20% of watch time could be ads, just like regular TV. Streamers don’t like ads: it kills the vibe when your audience gets a 2 minute timeout. So streamers aren’t running enough ad breaks, and try to support themselves via memberships, merch and other alternative monetizati…

It’s too bad they are so unimaginative when it comes to that. I mean at the very least they should hand controls to the streamer to run an ad: right now it’s the algorithm that does it. Also they should primarily look at other ways to monetize. Subs are still the best way, but not everyone has that kind of money. One other big problem is that there former heads just didn’t get streamers and they ran a lot of big ones…

They do give streamers a button to run an ad break, but they force ads on you if you don't run them often enough. That is very common for many streamers, because the ad breaks hit a large fraction of your viewers and it sort of kills the conversation for everyone.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

mullingitover wrote: post #118
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.

[deleted]
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