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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

#341

Post by no_carrier »

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?

I've always thought similarly about Uber. All they're doing is providing the platform and don't have to supply cars, drivers, etc. They basically take a cut on all rides worldwide and just have to supply a map solution. It seems to me they should be pretty damn profitable.

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

#342

Post by GreedClarifies »

hoofhearted wrote: post #336
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.

IIUC their advertising machine isn't quite as general as the networks of Google and Meta, and gains a large portion of its revenue from ads on Amazon Retail, which may not be competitive.

It's a guess as to the root cause.

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

#343

Post by 1905 »

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…

> 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]

Their ad is pushing their own Stake.com gambling site and having contracts with streamers to gamble on stream

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

#345

Post by alaskamiller »

bananapub wrote: post #49
edgyquant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

ask sam altman what he did - I still can't figure out how he went from "startup that went nowhere" to "hand out other people's money at YC until paulg fires him" to "CEO of openai".

Glad I'm not the only one

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

#346

Post by seoulmetro »

llm_nerd wrote: post #319
seoulmetro wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no one thinks Twitch employees are writing HTML. Especially not on a programmers forum... I took into account it's worldwide stage. >The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Not really. Contract work exists for new market capture. >narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled. Not misled at all. It's very much a reality. It only upsets those who are part of waste.

>It only upsets those who are part of waste. Who do you think is "upset"? Does that make you feel more confident in your positions by projecting emotions on people who disagree than you? Twitch has seen their revenues fall by 2/3rds so they're cutting heads. But their staffing levels are not remotely out of bounds for the scale of the operation. As an aside, the fallback that "oh and also all that other stuff can jus…

Not projecting anything. It's just an experience I've received from people who want to be part of that collective nothing.

Their staffing levels are remotely out of bounds for the scale of the operation.

No, I am not ceding anything. Locale and expanding market work is frequently done by contractors.

But yeah, you still sound upset it seems.

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

#347

Post by PeterStuer »

kenhwang wrote: post #148
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'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…

Twitch's differentiator is its backchannel, the viewer's 'chat'. Unfortunately for Twitch this only works if the whole loop is low latency. This makes it very hatd to optimize for cost. On top of this, it also makes adds even more intrusive and disruptive for the viewer.

One thing that surprised me is how they never managed to grow the VOD side. They basically handed that side, arguably a less costly and easier to monetize segment to Youtube.

For content producers, twitch often seems like a not the primary revenue stream. They put out lucrative sponsored content, or have twitch as an advertizing channel for their Youtube VOD/clips or their onlyfans. All revenue Twitch misses out on, while bearing the streaming cost.

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

#348

Post by no_wizard »

dexwiz wrote: post #154
no_wizard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really correct. While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end u…

The anti work subreddit was founded by people who were truly anti work. It was then co-opted by people in low and middle wage jobs venting about poor working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Its a great example of how moderates sanewash extremist ideas to something a bit more palatable, similar to defund the police. While most people probably want a demilitarization of police forces, some people truly want a p…

I would not say a subreddit is a good representation of a movement that existed long before it

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

#349

Post by hackeman300 »

autoexec wrote: post #337
bjclark wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>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

For the record this exact thing does exist for bigger streamers. See Ludwig for example, he switched to YouTube exclusively because it was a better deal than his twitch offer.

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

#350

Post by theGnuMe »

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…

I don't understand why multicast isn't used. I imagine starlink multicast will become a thing and maybe we will all get transceivers. Everything old will becomes new again...
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