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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

#351

Post by Sleaker »

Avicebron wrote: post #326
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Force people who want to sell on Amazon Marketplace to dedicate product to and pay for placement within Twitch streams. Then identify those products in the streams and spam the viewers & chat with purchase links and content streams that contain related recommended products. Turn the whole thing into a self-referential product placement & affiliate scheme.

Depending on how in in-your-face that is, it might just kill the platform. I don't have any definitive answers but maybe if they ramped up their own game development studios, and flooded the ecosystem with them, they might see some return on investment (people paying for micro transactions basically) that seems like a semi-organic fit for the platform.

This seems like it was already part of the plan, see lost ark + new world launches and ongoing prime support.

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

#352

Post by infamouscow »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #4

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.

Most of these tech platforms are stuck in 2017, despite being 2024.

Twitch and all of these other platforms have competitors eating their lunch, but they're paralyzed and unable to do anything about it because of they made a deal with the censorship devil. It's also been implemented for too long to reverse course and allow boobs, as they cannot risk upsetting their few remaining skittish advertisers.

Rather than weathering the storm with their endless supply of capital, most of the tech platforms caved to idealogical pressure and implemented algorithmic moderation systems and ideologically motivated content policies starting in 2017. The result has been alienating the undercurrent that really drives traffic to their platforms. It's ridiculous that most creators view getting banned as a rite of passage and indicator of future success on upcoming platforms like X, TikTok, and Rumble, but here we are.

I would feel bad, but these stagnant tech companies really have nobody to blame but themselves. They're ideologically captured to such a degree they don't see what's happening, and if you explain it, they'll deny it rather than entertain the idea.

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

#354

Post by justsomehnguy »

bmicraft wrote: post #335
justsomehnguy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher

Except you need more money thrown in the hardware to be able to utilize that bandwidth. It doesn't scale linearly. At some point it's easier to setup another node to handle another 10Gbit and while you now pay double the node cost , now you can actually scale horizontally, because it's easier to serve the same content to different people from many nodes than from one big fat one.

Also, you need clients who would watch your content and would give you ad views and hence money. If you pay $1000/m more for another 10Gbit for each node in the first place then it's another $1000/node you need to get each month.

Remember, this is not enterprise customers, with $/user costs, this is profiteering from a highly fluctuating and risky market of solving the service problem... without paying the IP holders anything. Though that's a B2B service problem too, but it wouldn't be solved till corporations' greed would exist.

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

#355

Post by autoexec »

hackeman300 wrote: post #349
autoexec wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen paid exclusivity deals from youtube before (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/youtube-reportedly-paid-usd160...) and while I'm surprised they paid a streamer like Ludwig to defect I'm pretty sure those kinds of deals don't exist for 99% of the content that gets uploaded to the platform.

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

#356

Post by Iwan-Zotow »

bjclark wrote: post #327
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…

I’m the founder and cto of a niche streaming platform. You don’t need to be google scale. You do need a different business model.

It's Amazon, anything niche is just not registered...

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

#357

Post by Thuggery »

ibbih wrote: post #164
kevinventullo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does “content is essentially free” apply to TikTok and not Twitch?

Twitch pays streamers?

Twitch "pays" streamers with a cut of the money they made off them though. The paycheck is 1/2 a cut of money given to the streamer by a third party with no work from Twitch, and 1/2 a cut from ad revenues that were generated by the eyeballs accrued by the streamers.

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

#358

Post by k12sosse »

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…

If you load the VOD while they're still live, you can pause in place and rewind. YouTube does it natively in the live broadcast, but Twitch being Twitch just isn't incentivized to make it on the actual live stream, probably because money.

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

#359

Post by justsomehnguy »

golergka wrote: post #261
justsomehnguy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place) Actually, the opposite is true. If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you hav…

> Actually, the opposite is true.

It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.

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

#360

Post by k12sosse »

timr wrote: post #163
hot_gril wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I figured you can place it on a CDN carefully, but it's not nearly as easy as with non-live video which I'd describe more as "throwing" it on there. And even with the complex infra already built, it must be still more expensive to operate. Everything you cache is only good for 10-15s.

It's more similar than you might think. The big problem is dealing with the bursty nature of live video -- lots of people will start watching a live event at the same time, which can easily trip you over into expensive bandwidth tier for the peak streams. You need to be able to react in real time and reallocate connections to cheaper providers, shape traffic, use peering arrangements, etc. Static video providers have…

Explains why they broke go-live notifications. It's meme-level timely now, sometimes 2-3 hours after they went live.
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