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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

#201

Post by vineyardmike »

dangus wrote: post #121
londons_explore wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is an “inside a bubble” take. The idea that software engineers at Twitter are influential on the platform is laughable. How many of these accounts are software engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

There’s more employees than just SWEs. And you don’t need to be generally famous, you need influence in key niches.

Twitter has historically hired people with large Twitter followings into roles that are more external. Some of them have been interviewed by the news media (eg The Verge). I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on advertisers.

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

#202

Post by heyoni »

minimaxir wrote: post #59
pcurve wrote: post #47

1600 ish down to 1100. That's a big percentage cut, but not a big number cut. I'm surprised they're not just letting natural attrition run its course.

When is 500 employees not a big number cut? The WARN Act calls mass layoffs at just 50 employees. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/WARN-FAQs.html

Maybe we’re being desensitized to layoffs but I agree that that’s a big number.

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

#203

Post by kevinventullo »

everforward wrote: post #176
kevinventullo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$3.50 per ad view is a very different number than $.20-$.40 per video view.

I wasn’t aware of the “one-time” aspect of TikTok creator monetization, but I just find it hard to believe anyone is going to make good content without being paid for it.

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

#204

Post by pclmulqdq »

prox wrote: post #186
pclmulqdq wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a button? I recently became affiliate but haven’t seen one, there is just controls for setting the intervals and the amount of time, with more perks as you increase the timeslots.

I believe the "run an ad" button is for partners.

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

#205

Post by whatyesaid »

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?

Hollywood accounting. First off, remember they're paying themselves (AWS).

Large streams are more expensive but those get the subs. Ad revenues they are also splitting but they play 3 minutes of ads that interrupts the entire content every 10 minutes.

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

#206

Post by dathinab »

prox wrote: post #186
pclmulqdq wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a button? I recently became affiliate but haven’t seen one, there is just controls for setting the intervals and the amount of time, with more perks as you increase the timeslots.

I roughly remember that there was one for a time which allowed you to somewhat shift the scheduled hourly ads, but I think they might have removed it after testing. Through I think it also never worked really well either.

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

#207

Post by hipadev23 »

kenhwang wrote: post #184
kevinventullo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Majority of TikTok's user base watches what TikTok decides to show them, which TikTok can optimize to lower their content creator payouts (and further optimized by only showing content that have been properly primed in the CDN). TikTok's monetization is also pretty nebulous and also terrible; Youtube's "bad" monetization rate is like $4 CPM, TikTok's is allegedly $0.001. People choose what they want to watch on Twitc…

I feel like you’ve never actually used twitch. What you’re describing in terms of how it works and “subscription costs” is very incorrect.

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

#208

Post by hot_gril »

wnevets wrote: post #161
TheRealPomax wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Live streaming 1080p 60fps video to a channel with even just a few hundred viewers I've been in streams with less than 100 viewers and seen hundreds of dollars in bits & gifted subs being spent in a single hype train. Are those really unprofitable for Twitch?

How long was the stream? Doesn't sound unprofitable if it's 30min to 1hr (my uneducated guess), but then again idk how many streams get donations like that.

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

#209

Post by dexwiz »

golergka wrote: post #178
benwilber0 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For them the viewer may actually be the product if they are distributing malware, mining coins in the background, or hijacking bandwidth. One reason to pay for a service is avoiding being a product. Rich people will pay out the nose for discretion because information about them has serious value.

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

#210

Post by wozniacki »

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…

Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2]

Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there.

In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. They rode the woke train as hard as they could and it was a sight to behold! They've recently slightly relaxed some of their disallowed content policies.

[1] Kick - Statistics & Facts https://www.statista.com/topics/11394/kick/#topicOverview

[2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/kick.com/

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