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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

#371

Post by KennyBlanken »

ctroein89 wrote: post #124
wnevets wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?

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…

Twitch gets 50% of subscriptions. "Bits" go to the streamer, 100% unless they used a third party app.

Streamers have to run a certain amount of ads per hour or they both lose a larger "share" of the ad revenue, and there is a preroll. Prerolls cause a huge impact in viewership so streamers don't want it.

The problem Twitch faces is that it now has multiple competitors: tiktok, youtube, and kick.

It's not just servers/engineers. Twitch has a lot of moderation issues and that requires a lot of labor. That's partly why the others are eating their lunch - little moderation.

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

#372

Post by KennyBlanken »

dathinab wrote: post #197
ctroein89 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I can tell most streamers most times are, or would be, fine with having roughly 3min of ADs per hour. If it's at an predictable time they can slightly shift around to match up with their content. It's a amount of time perfect to standup, stretch drink, something and similar healthy things you really should do every hour. (You can setup twitch that way.) But that's just 5% of ads. And if you change that to 1…

Streamers can pick when to run ads - it's a simple command.

All of you talking about how streamers just can't pick when to run an ad have no idea what you're talking about.

They can schedule a few 15 second ads and then run longer ads manually to fulfill their 50-50 revenue share / preroll exemption.

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

#373

Post by alkibiades »

MrFoof wrote: post #257

I honestly wonder how the softcore content works out in terms of impacting Twitch's balance sheet. I'm not interested in it, but I'm not against it. Yet I genuinely question how it works in Twitch's favor in any material way. Basically, I look at the softcore streams as those streamers using Twitch as a platform to provide additional content for no meaningful capital cost to the themselves (the streamers, not Twitch)…

it’s because they’re woke and think it’s sexist to ban that stuff

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

#374

Post by Ekaros »

no_carrier wrote: post #341
mikepurvis wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it is opposite of Uber. Content is free. There is hordes of people willing to do it for very little.

But actually doing the hard lifting of moving lot of bytes for users is the expensive thing. Ordering taxi and then updating location every few seconds is pretty light load. And there is not too many users doing it at one time.

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

#375

Post by corobo »

prox wrote: post #186
pclmulqdq wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do give streamers a button to run an ad break, but they force ads on you if you don't run them often enough. That is very common for many streamers, because the ad breaks hit a large fraction of your viewers and it sort of kills the conversation for everyone.

Is there a button? I recently became affiliate but haven’t seen one, there is just controls for setting the intervals and the amount of time, with more perks as you increase the timeslots.

Can you use the /commercial command? That should fire off 30s of ads. You can also specify longer breaks with e.g. /commercial 120

Manually running enough ads should also stop the auto scheduler from running ads and disable prerolls too

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

#376

Post by corobo »

hacketthfk wrote: post #237
ta8645 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which suggests that a less prudish content policy at Twitch might have kept OnlyFans from ever being created in the first place. They literally drove those consumers away to other platforms, squandering their early and dominant position in the market.

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.

> There is a reason porn sites are a separate category and not a section of mainstream sites.

Aye. Payment providers.

Porn is "high risk" and the fees for processing payments for it are way higher.

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

#377

Post by stale2002 »

k12sosse wrote: post #364
scarface_74 wrote: post #274

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.

This is not at all how it works.

Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere.

Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable".

The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money.

Twitch is doomed.

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

#378

Post by stale2002 »

dathinab wrote: post #266
wozniacki wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kick has the same cost or more then Twitch (they use the exact same infrastructure under the hood,it's a service sold by Amazone to Twitch and others). They saved some cost on building the UI etc. by well semi-stealing it from Twitch after a leak but that's just a saving bootstrapping cost not long term operation cost. When it comes to general advertisement friendliness they are far worse then Twitch, i.e. where Twit…

> So AFIK Kick isn't likely to make it longer, except maybe as legally and ethically questionable gambling paltform

You can't just say they are going to fail if we disclude the main reason why they are going to succeed!

There is a ton of money in gambling. That's why it's a very serious competitor.

They have a rare luxury of being able to tell advertisers to shove it, if they can make all their money doing gambling conversions.

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

#379

Post by prox »

corobo wrote: post #375
prox wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a button? I recently became affiliate but haven’t seen one, there is just controls for setting the intervals and the amount of time, with more perks as you increase the timeslots.

Can you use the /commercial command? That should fire off 30s of ads. You can also specify longer breaks with e.g. /commercial 120 Manually running enough ads should also stop the auto scheduler from running ads and disable prerolls too

Will try that, probably at the beginning of my stream when I have actually not started yet. Thanks!

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

#380

Post by prox »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #204
prox wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a button? I recently became affiliate but haven’t seen one, there is just controls for setting the intervals and the amount of time, with more perks as you increase the timeslots.

I believe the "run an ad" button is for partners.

Ah I see, not there yet ;)
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