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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

#291

Post by dboreham »

londons_explore wrote: post #71
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

> 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.

Amazon already had a long reputation as the Hunger Games of s/w so their rep can't go down much.

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

#292

Post by itsdrewmiller »

refulgentis wrote: post #86
matrix_overload wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

The problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms. Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negoti…

This comment is pretty hard to understand, but it's disagreeing with a comment that I think is 100% spot on about how layoffs actually work.

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

#293

Post by boneitis »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #182
echelon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kick allows sexual content and gambling content. Both of those are worth quite a bit for the content creators, the first of which is monetized by driving people to OnlyFans, and the second of which is monetized through incentives and partnerships with gambling sites.

(I misread parent a bit.)

Not to say that you are off, but what people here seem to be glossing over if not wholly overlooking is that Kick is entirely backed by founders of an online casino (quick searching will turn up very quickly who).

"partnerships" and "intertwined" that I'm seeing on this submission feel like they are understating it: Kick is owned by a casino.

A Harris Heller clip of a pretty thoughtful take, IMO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKMnBZ0LlP4&t=423s

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

#294

Post by ta_1138 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #272
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 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?

What nobody tells you is that the cost of hosting all that content, and streaming it live with little lag, is far more expensive than many would guess. Netflix can have boxes with cached content very near you, and your ISP even likes it, as the most streamed content tends to be the same for many users. On Twitch, it's not so easy: You really want everyone to be seeing things with minimal lag, so they can spend all that money buying bits.

Other streaming services, which can use all of the tricks to save bandwidth and compute, have eye-watering AWS costs. Even with their high take rates, I bet there's a lot of streamers that, once accounting for their share of infra costs, end up losing twitch money.

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

#295

Post by wnevets »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #199
wnevets wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

When someone buys a sub ($5-25 depending on tier), Twitch gets half the money. Bits are a little more complicated. Donators have to buy bits ahead of time and then donate them. 100 bits is worth $1 to a streamer. But 100 bits will cost between $1.18 and $1.26 depending on how many bits you buy at once. Buying a larger block means paying a little less. (Side note: Once the streamer has received the bits, they can't be…

> If a streamer with It would occur regularly to several different streamers I used to watch. Double digit level hype trains were the norm and according to the leaked earnings they were making well over 100K on twitch.

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

#296

Post by firecall »

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…

Adding to that, I was watching Doug DeMuros round on YouTube the other day.

He noted that his views were down, and he likely suspected some of his audience had moved to TikTok.

Or something along those lines :-)

Doug is a massive Car Review YouTuber - maybe the biggest?

I can’t imagine seeking out the same content I get on YouTube but on TikTok.

But then it’s not content I guess, it’s attention. Is TikTok just stealing attention and will watch anything that served to them on the platform they happen to on that day.

Makes you wonder how much power personalities actually have :-/

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

#297

Post by belltaco »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #251
ayberk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sub to the channel or get Twitch Turbo to remove ads. One sub is free if you have Amazon Prime.

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

#298

Post by llm_nerd »

seoulmetro wrote: post #45
madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

[flagged]

This sort of comment always seems to be made based on the idea that Twitch was 1430 employees all writing HTML or something.

In reality it's a company that operates around the world across an enormous number of jurisdictions, dealing with governments and censorship and laws and regulations. That has a significant legal operation, a significant moderation operation, and deals with payments to many streamers, again in many jurisdictions. The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable.

Twitch has seen collapsing revenue and they need to right-size, but these sort of peanut gallery "hurrr how can they have so many employees" narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled.

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

#299

Post by boneitis »

cavisne wrote: post #280
coffeebeqn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm finding it curious that everybody here seems to be overlooking this.

---

(I think the thread is too deep and preventing me from replying directly to child post)

I posted here[0] a link to a video with pretty good commentary, speculating on and critiquing their strategy.

To paraphrase it, they are not necessarily banking on operational costs being dwarfed by casino revenue in and of itself... but that Kick will yield exposure and drive more people to their gambling platform overall. He is also skeptical and fairly unconvinced that it'll be a slam dunk venture for them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935436

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

#300

Post by gverrilla »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #252
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

Esports is at it's infancy, but increasing in size and developing. But yeah they would have to innovate, and would be a challenge. And have a focused strategy. Is there any other segment where Twitch currently holds an advantageous position? Counter-strike majors are mainly watched through twitch even though steam offers in-game streams.
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