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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, that's surprising. It's in-house then? I can't imagine they'd be paying a non-AWS provider.

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

#272

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 shocked it's not profitable. I've watched a person close to me spend $100/mo buying bits and get back nothing more than a few reaction emotes and jumpscares. Twitch's take on that is 50% isn't it? How on earth is it not profitable running a marketplace with those parameters and so many whales spending compulsively for a few seconds of attention from their favourite streamer?

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most "normal" streams get their maximum viewer count around 2 hours into the stream. While streamers tend to have something like a waiting room for the first 10-30min of their stream. A typical streamer which can life from it but isn't getting rich (or even wealthy!) tends to stream 6+h streams at at least 3 days a week more likely 4-5. Which additional time costs for stuff like filling taxes preparing streams, updat…

I don't know what the streams cost Twitch, but that sounds like a lot of video. Sure viewers are hopping on and off and don't chew bandwidth while off, but still, I suspect 15min of someone streaming Twitch is a lot less valuable than 15min of watching YouTube.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because Amazone owns Twitch doesn't mean they pay themself, they are still two distinct legal entities and Twitch is competing with other non Amazone owned companies (e.g. Kick) for the same resources. If Twitter would not pay Amazone I think it might even somewhat fall under competitive distortion/unfair competition. Large steams do amortize cost while the bandwidth cost is somewhat scaling per viewer there are…

> If Twitter would not pay Amazone I think it might even somewhat fall under competitive distortion/unfair competition.

It’s “unfair competition” for a company to use its own servers to host its own business?

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

#275
post #41

Unity and Twitch doing massive layoffs to start the year? I feel somewhat nervous being in video game adjacent SaaS

I saw some hysterical Twitter thread a couple days ago claiming that the end of AAA games was nigh. There are some weird vibes out there. It's absolutely true that there have been a ton of layoffs in the past ~12 months. But I've seen zero evidence of actual sales slowing down. 2023 saw a ton of big hits, from Zelda to Diablo to Baldur's Gate.

Great year for games , not for game developers. I’m under no illusion that games are dying or anything like that

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally switched to youtube* for the streams I watch, since twitch's ads can be really disruptive. Not to mention they used to be ad-free for prime members, while at the same time the ad rolls became longer and longer. *I pay for youtube premium

Every streaming platform seems to be converting to adding ads on top to cover the costs. Disney+ just did it for my paid membership - which I cancelled

People need to stop paying for a service and then also paying with their time via ads. Desperate moves like this make me wonder if these companies are regular greedy/shitty or if they're reading from the playbooks of cable TV early 1990s.

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

#277
post #257

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)…

> 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.

I don't really understand this logic. The fact that they make more money somewhere else means that they should have to somehow give that money to Twitch as well? If Twitch isn't set up to be able to make a profit from subs and bits, that sounds like an issue with their business model, and they should find a better way to monetize users on their site. From some very basic searching, it looks like there are NBA, MLB, and NFL players who stream on Twitch, as well as professional musicians and actors, and I imagine most of them aren't making the majority of their income on Twitch either, so should Twitch be trying to get a cut of their product endorsement deals and other sources of income that come from being famous?

I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong that that Twitch is losing money on them, but I don't really see how that's something specific to one type of streamer. If the issue is the ratio of subscribers/donations to the number of people watching those streams, why not just make policies about that specifically, like putting limits on how frequently someone can stream after a certain number of hours without having a certain amount of revenue either via subs/donations or showing ads? I think they'd make much more effective strides towards profitability focusing on stuff like that.

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

#278

Hmm, so they’re starting to feel the effects of ZIRP on pause, good. But they’re also still in the mindset that they need to prevent boobs at all costs. Say what you want about the anything, ZIRP being on pause is about the greatest thing going right now. Unless you’re trying to buy a home I guess.

Why is it good? Because corporations fire their employees? Not sure why that would be good for most people unless you are the FED lol

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

#279
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During this past Christmas Twitch "meta" I could not even link clips to friends because it would bring up "related" popular clips of what was basically soft core porn. It goes beyond what we want to watch. It affects how I can use and interact with the service to other people.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No they run on online casino money, the founders own Stake.com
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