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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

#391

Post by DanielHB »

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…

Consider that "unprofitable" quote includes the fact that Twitch probably gets AWS compute at cost (Amazon subsidies Twitch server costs)

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

#392

Post by dathinab »

scarface_74 wrote: post #385
dathinab wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.

AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates. You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?

no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone.

and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.

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

#393

Post by Jommi »

npalli wrote: post #175
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…

>> Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. >This ... is wild, I had no idea Twitch wasn't profitable Indeed very wild. Ironic too, considering the co-founder (Michael Siebel) is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.

He actually left Twitch pretty early on though.

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

#394

Post by scarface_74 »

dathinab wrote: post #392
scarface_74 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates. You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?

no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone. and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.

This is not in any way shape or form true.

When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO.

(Former AWS employer)

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

#395

Post by bombcar »

mnky9800n wrote: post #388
bombcar wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free peering always was just "Hey, I have 10GB of transit to push to you, and you have about the same, let's keep the beancounters out of this." As consumer Internet grew, that became more and more unstable, until Netflix hit and just absolutely overwhelmed it.

In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things. Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and k…

Entire industries exist to bypass the bean counters. Arguably much of SaaS just is that.

But you can make a comfortable living as a small VAR by just buying product and charging more to companies for it in the way their bean counters like to see it.

$1000 item with $8 VAT line item? Unacceptable.

$2000 same item with no VAT? Perfectly cromulent.

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

#396

Post by PurpleRamen »

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…

> I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not.

Twitch seems to pay normal rates for AWS. And they are around the profit-zone for several years now it seems, just not making big money. So they are in fact very profitable, just not for Twitch, but for AWS and Amazon.

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

#397

Post by PurpleRamen »

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?

Roughly spoken, there are 5-10 million active streamers, but only 5-10k who even make a significant amount of money. So even while most of them neither see a relevant number of viewers, or any viewer at all, they still create a huge baseline of costs just by existing and streaming.

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

#398

Post by PurpleRamen »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #372
dathinab wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the mode. They can choose the time, but then get awful poor ad-revenue. Or they take the juicy contract, and are forced to let twitch decide when ads are rolling. And with gaming content, even choosing the time is not always flowing well with your content.

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

#399

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

mardifoufs wrote: post #278
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.

Why is it good? Because corporations fire their employees? Not sure why that would be good for most people unless you are the FED lol

Yes.

Companies that have spent the last decade “cooperating” by flexing their monopolies and enjoying their artificially pumped up numbers, should have to deflate.

I am hopeful for at least two more rounds of cuts at all of these giants. They have done absolutely nothing customer focused in years and it is about time they feel some heat.

Between censorship, data selling and collection abuses, anti-competitive practices, stale services, outright harmful manipulation of every age group, known and exploited mental health and echo chamber issues, narrative pushing, government collaboration… yea man, watch me shed a tear for these texh companies.

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

#400

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

belltaco wrote: post #297
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can sub to the channel or get Twitch Turbo to remove ads. One sub is free if you have Amazon Prime.

If I have to pay then I might as well wait for the vod
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