Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
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Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
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Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#3Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
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Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#5https://archive.is/GP6GW
Appears to be missing most of the text
Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#6The article is paywalled but I wonder if the lack of profitability is Twitch's inability to get users onto their own advertising platform from which they get a cut. It seems streamers get a lot of revenue from sponsorships and partnerships outside Twitch and have pressured Twitch to keep it that way. [1]
Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#7I'm always skeptical when a company says one of their divisions is losing money. It might be true but it also might just be an accounting trick.
Amazon rolled the Twitch IP into AWS as a service that other people buy called Interactive Video Services ("IVS") [1]. Twitch uses this but so do third parties like kick.com. Is Amazon charging Twitch a reasonable fee for whatever AWS resources they use?
So is Twitch actually losing money or has the profit just been shifted to AWS? It's unclear. Or has profit been siphoned away with the revenue cut Twitch gets from Amazon's ad platform?
Amazon has an incentive to present Twitch as unprofitable as it uses that narrative to reduce the revenue cut streamers get from subscriptions and ads.
Lastly, over the last few years Twitch has hugely ramped up ad density (IIRC it is as high as 8 minutes per hour and a minimum of 4 minutes). To entice streamers with a higher ad density, Twitch has removed the exclusiviity clauses that Twitch partners used to have. How much money has this cost Twitch? Streamers can now use Twitch, for example, to simply drive traffic to Youtube.
Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#8I wonder how the accounting nets out when you consider quite a lot of the costs are likely billed internally for use of Amazon infrastructure. Charging market rate for AWS hosting, billing services, etc, could helpfully make a low margin profitable operation into a tax deductible money pit.
Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#9i'm a big fan of twitch. the communities built around games and people contain so much value which don't currently translate to revenue, but I think it will over time. I think twitch has to increase cost of advertising once people realize what kind of social capital that exists over there.
just my opinion.
Re: Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
#10i'm a big fan of twitch. the communities built around games and people contain so much value which don't currently translate to revenue, but I think it will over time. I think twitch has to increase cost of advertising once people realize what kind of social capital that exists over there. just my opinion.
Here's my opinion. Twitch is the shittiest content platform ever made, technologically and culturally. It's an inconsistent hyper-suppressive clown show where everyone has to collapse down to the lowest common denominator of puritanical censorship (unless they're Hasan or Frogan) because the backend is too retarded to be able to segment content for advertisers like YouTube does. On that note, fuck advertisers. And fuck Twitch. I can't wait until it dies.
And shout out to Asmongold streaming to tens of thousands of people on his unpartnered second channel, costing Twitch ~$20k per stream in lost revenue. Unfortunately, they're going to force him to monetize that channel soon. ;p