Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

Post by rpmisms » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #324

_jal wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic. It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base. And now there's…

> Firing the Trust and Safety team Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy. And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other…

Post by lakomen » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #374

no_carrier wrote: post #341

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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.

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

benwilber0 wrote: post #170

kenhwang wrote: post #148

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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…

Post by firstSpeaker » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

bjclark wrote: post #334

raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...

Post by some_random » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #425

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…

We did this peer-to-peer but the risks for users became too great for that to be sustainable.