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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

#171

Post by swores »

kevinventullo wrote: post #153
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Twitch streamers get ad revenue sharing, afaik TikTok users don't?

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

#172

Post by e1g »

kevinventullo wrote: post #153
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Twitch pays out to creators 50-70% (some earn millions per year) TikTok pays essentially $0

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

#173

Post by dathinab »

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?

TL;DR: more operation cost then it seems, limited AD income, many streamer on which they lose money, increasingly more competition with "unfair advantage" (second platform effect, YT/TickTock; unethical content Kik(gambling); unethical monetization strategies TickTock).

operating a reasonable reliable live streaming service is quite expensive and Twitch is not Amazone. Sure it's owned by it but it still has to buy all computation resources from Amazone, for similar prices then some of the competition like Kick (which deeply interwinded with gambling streams which are profitable but ethically and legally problematic and hence banned on Twitch)

and while they do take a cut this is only profitable if a streamer gets enough subs/bits etc.

but most streamers on twitch do not get that, but might still have people watching across two continents+. E.g. having less then 50 viewers but viewers across 2 continents with a stream earning less 1€ income (not profit) per-hour in average isn't that rare

So the "big streamers" would need to subvention the cost of Twitch being free for streamers, which isn't easy. That some people do use Twitch as a form of marketing platform to goat people on other platforms and then there earn money from then doesn't help (and given how little twitch does against that but often simply could I'm seriously wondering if there is some internal employee corruption scandal to be uncovered).

Then there is another issue Twitch has compared to YT, it ADs are worth way less. Actually often Twitch doesn't even get enough ADs bought out so that some people in some regions sometimes see no or hardly any ADs (no one bought any) or ADs repeat too often...

Lastly and maybe for some people surprisingly given how some tech channels love to blow up any small negative news about twitch it's trying to act "reasonable ethically", i.e. not "oh they are grate people ethically" but "they have limits on how evil they act which are more then the law requires" ethically. You can see this if you compare the usage of dark patterns and highly addictive feedback loops between Twitch and TickTock. The later maxes out everything they can wrt. dark patterns which have addictive effects (at least for vulnerable people) and obfuscate how much money you spend. While Twitch, well does not do so.

Oh and probably there was some mismanagement, not now but a few years ago.

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

#174

Post by prox »

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.

If you are really interested then Twitch Turbo disables ads for about 10 a month,

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

#175

Post by npalli »

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…

>> Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

>This ... is wild, I had no idea Twitch wasn't profitable

Indeed very wild. Ironic too, considering the co-founder (Michael Siebel) is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.

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

#176

Post by everforward »

kevinventullo wrote: post #153
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't really follow the space, so if I use the wrong amounts or titles, someone please correct me.

For streamers with even a moderate following, they'll be in some status with Twitch to earn money off Twitch's ads. Don't recall if it's Affiliate or Partner or what, but the follower counts were surprisingly small to qualify for ad revenue.

Twitch pays out $3.50 per 1k ad views to those creators, so Twitch is paying for their content.

Tiktok has something that pays out to creators, but it's $0.20-$0.40 per 1k views and you need 10k subscribers to qualify (this seems much harder than Twitch's, which is in the hundreds iirc). It also looks like it was a one-time thing, where they set $300 million aside for that but I haven't seen any plans to continually fund it.

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

#178

Post by golergka »

benwilber0 wrote: post #170
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc. It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also f…

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

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

#179

Post by bradleyishungry »

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.

They have more competition than ever with youtube streaming actually somewhat catching on and tiktok streams becoming more popular. It seems weird to cut so many engineers when it’s probably most important now to innovate. Its not even just R&D that’s important, either. Their product is worse in some aspects than their competitors and a lot of the reason why they’re still dominant in their space is just the community of users on the website.

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

#180

Post by ihuman »

jron wrote: post #147
pugworthy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't work when you channel hop on a regular basis.

Twitch still has Nitro, which removes ads for all channels
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