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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

#331

Post by VirusNewbie »

no_wizard wrote: post #265
VirusNewbie wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like we could check this. Is your hypothesis that an outsized number of SVP/EVP at top paying tech companies are going to be from either dynastic wealth or from traditional Ivy backgrounds?

They already hail largely from top 50 colleges[0][1], for instance. We know that Ivy League graduates have better access to opportunity and privilege than anyone else, there's enough out there on this that I would consider it common knowledge by now. [0]: https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/schools/which-college... [1]: Note, I didn't say Ivy league, but arisotricatic institutions. These include many state univers…

I don’t care that much about fortune 500. I make more than some C level on the lower end of the list as an IC at FAANG. I’m not talking about people making high six or low seven figure a year packages, i’m talking about people making more than most professional athletes.

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

#332

Post by BizarreByte »

matchbok wrote: post #63
nine_zeros wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50% Keep in mind that execs will get bonuses for cutting costs but the real workers have additional work without a raise. The downward spiral seems almost inevitable - attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat.

The real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?

Overpaid parasites in a lot of cases.

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

#333

Post by bombcar »

covercash wrote: post #93
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…

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side… They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce b…

I've always been entirely annoyed that there's no way for me to "encode what Google wants" for YouTube so it can be available directly, at least at highest bitrate.

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

#334

Post by bjclark »

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…

When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...

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

#335

Post by bmicraft »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #188
golergka wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overload…

c) and d) don't make much sense

Bandwidth might be cheaper in absolute terms, but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher. How do you go from there to "the business model is to not scale up"

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

#336

Post by hoofhearted »

GreedClarifies wrote: post #318

What does Amazon use for their ads network? My guess is that it just isn't competitive and so Twitch can't monetize. Or maybe it is the demographic. But the ads network is my first guess.

They use the Amazon Advertising Network.

Their advertising machine is third largest revenue generator next to sellers fees and AWS.

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

#337

Post by autoexec »

bjclark wrote: post #325
autoexec wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the content is free for twitch and youtube too.

You’ve never heard of partnered twitch streamers or YouTube rev share?

They might pay creators a fraction of what they make on ads or other extras (digital bullshit like emotes), but none of that is in exchange for the content. The content is still being developed, written, produced, performed, and provided to the platforms entirely for free.

Unless there's some kind option where youtube or twitch signs a contract with select creators and then hands them huge sums of cash upfront for the costs of future content production, or to license the creator's existing content to distribute via youtube/twitch then the cost of getting that content is still just as free for youtube/twitch as it is for the pirate streamers that upload bluray rips.

Ad revenue is money gained from advertisers at the expense of viewers, it's entirely separate from the cost of the content being viewed.

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

#338

Post by bombcar »

gurchik wrote: post #95
joegibbs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the ad policy?

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…

wait do the ads roll based on time since viewer connected?

Back in the day the streamer would take a break and roll some ads, so you knew you didn't miss anything ...

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

#339

Post by InSteady »

kevinventullo wrote: post #203
everforward wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is you are thinking too narrowly by only looking at payments per view, ad, etc. Influencers don't care so much about that so much as the value of views as a metric. They don't get paid by the platform, they get payed by their audience and especially by advertisers for product reviews, placement, etc. But just like twitter, tiktok is full of people with no serious plans to get famous who put effort into making content. Same with HN. It's fun to shout creatively into the void when you get a bit of validation back in the form of conversations, arbitrary points, views, etc.

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

#340

Post by echelon »

Washuu wrote: post #279
hacketthfk wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitch should de-boost such content. That's the easiest method. Super easy to implement and moderate, no waffling on the rules, users are kept happy.
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