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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

#431

Post by jacquesm »

rabuse wrote: post #426
jacquesm wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting. I invented 'live streams' to the browser and when youtube and Twitch rose to prominence our days were numbered, simply because we weren't going to play the VC game. And now TikTok does the exact same thing that we were already doing in the 90's and makes enormous headway with it.

It's just a matter of numbers and timing. There's just so many more eyeballs on the web now, and with so much more bandwidth than ever before.

That's true. At the time we had about 110K visitors / day which made us a top 20 website, today that probably wouldn't even put you in the top 1000.

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

#432

Post by pests »

ekianjo wrote: post #156
VirusNewbie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost. They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

> don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy. Usually you dont hire if your business is not working or expected to grow

Why fire then rehire so soon then?

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

#433

Post by toomuchtodo »

jacquesm wrote: post #430
some_random wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sorts of risks to users were you seeing?

Stalkers figuring out where the women live and then doing housecalls, blackmail, etc. Too many assholes on this planet for a service like that to work in a way that potentially allows for people to be identified.

And it is only getting easier.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38813150

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

#434

Post by pests »

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…

I'm not seeing his principled stance. In fact, it seems business as usual. He still bans content he doesn't agree with and doesn't follow through with anything he says.

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

#435

Post by JoeOfTexas »

stefan_ wrote: post #106
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

The infrastructure is bought from Amazon, who in turn own them. Makes you wonder if it’s actually unprofitable, on the whole.

If its anything like my corp, Twitch only gets a small discount, if any at all. It's expensive regardless. Network bandwidth alone is probably in the $20+ million a month range.

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

#436

Post by ProxCoques »

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.

> is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.

If I was a startup, I'd think hard about whether a guy who may well just have been lucky (and certainly didn't do anything significant after his first big win) rather than skillful, should be talking to me about conducting my business.

But I'm not a startup, and thank my stars for that.

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

#437

Post by jpk »

lakomen wrote: post #423
Ekaros wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What hard lifting? Flat rate egress.

Twitch also transcodes live, etc. There's much more to streaming infra than just egress costs.

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

#438

Post by ProxCoques »

93po wrote: post #402
VirusNewbie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost. They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

> they've had a lot of downtime Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable. The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down"…

This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza?

I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.

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

#439

Post by Jensson »

autoexec wrote: post #337
bjclark wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The content is still being developed, written, produced, performed, and provided to the platforms entirely for free.

No, it is developed because the creator expects the platform to pay them for the views. Which the platforms does. Most big channels wouldn't exist without that money.

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

#440

Post by rescbr »

Supermancho wrote: post #420
fer wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not. I don't think any significant chunk of the Twitch infra runs on AWS.

I found this: https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure...

IVS doesn’t (or at least when I worked there, didn’t) use AWS network.

Streaming traffic goes (or went) through Twitch’s network - it’s cheaper traffic compared to CloudFront’s.

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