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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

#361
post #151

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Video is expensive, and streamers don’t like ads. Amazon has for years been saying that they think that Twitch is under monetized. In their minds, 20% of watch time could be ads, just like regular TV. Streamers don’t like ads: it kills the vibe when your audience gets a 2 minute timeout. So streamers aren’t running enough ad breaks, and try to support themselves via memberships, merch and other alternative monetizati…

It’s too bad they are so unimaginative when it comes to that. I mean at the very least they should hand controls to the streamer to run an ad: right now it’s the algorithm that does it. Also they should primarily look at other ways to monetize. Subs are still the best way, but not everyone has that kind of money. One other big problem is that there former heads just didn’t get streamers and they ran a lot of big ones…

We never did find out why they banned doc.

I first bought YT premium after I found out the YT model of ad-free is ONLY the equivalent to buying Twitch turbo. A membership to the channel will still get you ads.

And having YT premium changed the game of how I consume all media.

Thanks, Twitch.

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

#362

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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, or to license the creator's existing content to distribute via youtube/twitch

That’s exactly how it works. And the fractions (on Twitch) are between 50% to 70%.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

99% of page views? Absolutely. Mr Beast absolutely has a YouTube contract and absolutely drives percentage points of traffic.

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

#364

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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?

More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.

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

#365

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> 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…

I have often wondered when the big spenders are coming from export controlled countries, do the Federals ever get involved?

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.

So now you’re saying a company is not allowed to branch out and have any other applications on their own servers?

Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then squarely look at the Ivys. Majority come from there either directly or by lineage.

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

#368
post #83

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What happened to the ad policy?

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…

Hate anything remotely sex-related? Are we talking about Twitch? They have changed their policy a billion times because they seem hell-bent on avoiding censoring sexual content as much as the possibly can. It’s the users that inevitably find a way to push the boundaries so far that they are forced do something, that is usually so half-assed that it doesn’t change much. At this point Twitch is getting closer to a cam site that funnels people to OnlyFans than it is to its gaming roots.

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

#369
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much easier said than done. A million camgirls all trying to boost their engagement are going to find ways to game your algorithm faster than you are going to find ways to de-boost them. It’s the same fundamental reason Google is overrun with SEO spam and content farms that they can’t simply “de-boost”.

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

#370

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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...

Multicast on the public Internet has never been much of a thing, and seems unlikely to ever be much of a thing.

(Some of us have been dreaming about it becoming reality for decades, but some of us have also given up years ago.)

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