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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

bloomberg.com

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

#251

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

ayberk wrote: post #196
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'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself. This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tou…

I watch starcraft on twitch but can never watch it live. It'll get to a crucial moment and then a 3 minute commercial interrupts. Literally the game is over at that point. No point to watch.

They'd have done better with some sort of integrated commercials or banner bar or something else.

Or even just buffering those 3 minutes. So I do watch on twitch but I wait till the match is over.

What also sucks about twitch is you can't rewind. So many problems there

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

#252

Post by coffeebeqn »

gverrilla wrote: post #234

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 shou…

Esports so far has been a terrible business. No one wants to pay PPV for vidya games when you can watch so much of that for free. And most orgs have failed to find any real means of revenue. Just one example the Overwatch league that required millions invested to own a team is being shut down

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

HWR_14 wrote: post #239
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…

How is Amazon not a Google-scale peer?

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by joebob42 »

londons_explore wrote: post #88
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…

> they take a large cut from subscribers I'm surprised they don't have a 'choose your own revshare' setting, allowing the creator choose how much to pay twitch. Obviously twitch will recommend more profitable creators, so you get a kind of 'race to the top', with creators offering twitch a larger and larger revshare, knowing that unless they do, their audience size will dwindle. It also encourages creators to come in…

I think subscribers are sticky enough that this would pretty quickly drive revshare down.

Especially when I imagine a sizable portion of revenue comes from the very biggest streamers, who may not need discovery from twitch at all and would then default to the lowest value. Like, this model has sort of flipped setup from what I'd think you want; the more successful you are the lower twitches cut.

I suppose they could just make the minimum value 50% (iiuc this is the current value). But I'm still not sure how much it would help.

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

#255

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

HWR_14 wrote: post #239
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…

How is Amazon not a Google-scale peer?

The bandwidth was obviously never the problem for Amazon. It was the actual content. How do you monetize Twitch streamers and, more importantly, Twitch stream viewers? They never figured that out, even at Amazon-scale.

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

#256

Post by fieldcny »

tempestn wrote: post #226
scarface_74 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion

I guess one could also argue in these cases that the founder started a very promising company, and the buyer failed to realize its potential.

You must be in marketing

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

#257

Post by MrFoof »

I honestly wonder how the softcore content works out in terms of impacting Twitch's balance sheet.

I'm not interested in it, but I'm not against it. Yet I genuinely question how it works in Twitch's favor in any material way.

Basically, I look at the softcore streams as those streamers using Twitch as a platform to provide additional content for no meaningful capital cost to the themselves (the streamers, not Twitch). It's basically a free additional discovery and advertising channel to attract new users to their core monetization platform (like OnlyFans) where they make their actual money. Twitch is basically giving them a free platform to direct most of the money to another platform, not to Twitch.

So where is Twitch making real money in that? If you're telling me through subs and bits, you're out of your mind, because that's peanuts compared to what those gals are getting from their OnlyFans, merch, other donation platforms, etc. They're snatching up nickels while the comparative money firehose is pointed elsewhere, all while diluting their brand at least a bit. Granted, I feel they need to expand their audience regardless out of the video game niche, but I question if this has been materially moving the needle.

-----

Don't even get me started on the other core issues. The abhorrent recommendations and difficulty of discovery, the inadequate monetization options for streamers, the limited number of advertisers and where I only get recommended product categories (like energy drinks) I have never bought in my existence, etc.

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

#259

Post by spenczar5 »

tempestn wrote: post #193
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…

The majority of Twitch's costs are going to be revenue to AWS; I wonder if they are still unprofitable if you include the AWS earnings on those services. Or in other words, if AWS hosts Twitch at cost, is it profitable then? If so, or if it's even close, the business would still have value to them. Maybe this layoff is intended to get there.

Twitch’s video infra is not on AWS. Only the non-video stuff is. Video and networking costs a lot.
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