> I don't think they are. No, they are, according to internal leaks. Basically, after around some thousand viewers, the cost of a stream grows faster than the

> I don't think they are. No, they are, according to internal leaks. Basically, after around some thousand viewers, the cost of a stream grows faster than the income it generates. Though, not sure if it's still valid after their increase of ads in the last year. > Given the same size total audience it's much cheaper for Twitch to distribute one stream around the world a million times than it is to distribute thousands of streams around the world a few times each. Same size of what? Viewers? Resolution? > Transcoding only has to happen once, each segment only has to be distributed to each area of the world once This has two flaws. Each stream is available in multiple resolutions, and the bigger a stream, the higher the chance someone will pick a different resolution than origin. Similar, most stream are kinda local, but with bigger streams, chance raises that it goes into some different corner of the world. So your argument is only valid under the assumption that the baseload of each stream would be exactly same in every detail. But you also miss the important detail, that traffic costs, and there is only so much you can do to reduce it. But somehow you think that between 1k viewers, 10k viewers and 100k viewers there is no relevant cost-difference? > And based on anecdotes shared by some of those big streamers Twitch ads have gotten more and more profitable. Yes, but that's a very recent development.