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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

#231

Post by nstart »

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 haven’t looked at TikTok streaming but it would make sense if this has risen strongly. Twitch’s biggest category became “just chatting”. This was always a category ripe for being stolen by someone else on its own. If TikTok streaming is rising, I’m wondering if they have eaten into the just charting category growth.

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

#232

Post by coffeebeqn »

nathants wrote: post #131
lchengify wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Running on VC money? AWS sounds like a terrible place to host your live streaming infrastructure unless cost is irrelevant

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

#233

Post by dathinab »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #133
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?

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…

I thin calling it a subdevvision is already an overstatement I think it's not even that.

Amazone provides something like a "live streaming infrastructure service" which they sell to Twitch and others (including the competition like Kick).

For them buying Twitch was good as it allowed them to thoroughly test that service somewhat "in-house", have an initial customer for it to show what it can do etc.

But now that this is done for Amazone there is little value in Twitch, mainly:

- can it make profit (currently no)

- does it improve our image (surprisingly yes, a bit)

- does it allow us to sell more prime memberships (in the past for a short time yes, I don't think anymore)

- does it send bad signals if we shrink/close it now which could affect Amazone stock (somewhat, but if you slowly try to fix it show that you do and then if it doesn't work sell it probably no)

(parts in brackets are speculative)

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

#234

Post by gverrilla »

twitch should focus on sports and esports, and not on fan-based communities which are so cringe with personalized emotes and whatnot. turbo should be cheaper for international audience. high-quality live video should be paid. everybody else should get pseudo-live video. it should make partnerships and deals both with gaming and sports companies (and platforms like Steam) and sports/e-sports event companies. they should also stop promoting amazon, it was very boring when every streamer was selling that amazon prime bullshit instead of giving me content. I would pay to watch twitch, but not monthly as I only care about a few events a year for the game I like to watch (counter-strike).

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

#235

Post by coffeebeqn »

wozniacki wrote: post #210
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. The…

I doubt kick is making a profit either

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

#236

Post by thomasfortes »

dangus wrote: post #125
gurchik wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch will run preroll ads on your stream unless you elect to run at least 3 minutes of ads per hour. These preroll ads have a huge effect on viewership because new viewers who tune in to an immediate ad will typically just leave. So, these "elective" ads are not very optional. But, this is a lose-lose situation, because these elective ads are very disruptive to viewers too. They are often implemented as a 90 second…

And here’s the other thing: why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience? I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos. At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.

> I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.

Discoverability, content creators and community.

Live streaming is a second class citizen on youtube, and as such it is hidden under dropdowns, the live streams aren't always on the top of your followers, live recommendations are worse than useless and the big creators that move to youtube do like Ninja with Mixer, with a big fat paycheck to justify the loss of viewership and community.

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

#237

Post by hacketthfk »

ta8645 wrote: post #217
philwelch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wil…

Which suggests that a less prudish content policy at Twitch might have kept OnlyFans from ever being created in the first place. They literally drove those consumers away to other platforms, squandering their early and dominant position in the market.

There is a reason porn sites are a separate category and not a section of mainstream sites.

I don't want to see porn when I watch news or video games.

If I want to see porn, I know where to find it.

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

#238

Post by dathinab »

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?

Most streams with less then 100 viewers I have seen have maybe 1-2 gift subs when streaming 5 hours or so...

Through even on larger streams most gifts come from a relatively small number of people so there definitely are some outliers like you described but as far as I can tell they are the exception not the norm.

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

#239

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

How is Amazon not a Google-scale peer?

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

#240

Post by octacat »

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…

It is more tricky to do p2p because not all viewers use stationary PCs nowadays. There are mobiles or wifi users, who cannot be the rebroadcaster nodes. Bittorenty style delivery maybe will work, just with higher delays.

Youtube is probably good enough for steamers.

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