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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
- goles 3y agohttps://archive.is/Aw7vO https://archive.is/Aw7vO
- madcadmium 3y agoThe remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%
- nine_zeros 3y ago> The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50% Keep in mind that execs will get bonuses for cutting costs but the real workers have additional work without a raise. The downward spiral seems almost inevitable - attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat.
- kibwen 3y ago> attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat Execs are lauded for cutting costs, parasitically enrich themselves on the carcass of a once-productive business, jump ship to a new host before it all comes crashing down, repeat.
- cableshaft 3y agoSome execs have already jumped ship. From the article: "In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit."
- _jal 3y agoFunny, I read this just recently. https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
- edgyquant 3y agoSounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?
- no_wizard 3y agoBe born in the aristocracy[0] or land one of the very small openings where executives get hired from outside the circle via executive recruiting, which usually means networking your way to VP / SVP at a some kind of notable firm or otherwise getting close to attainment of the executive class. I hear being an ex-founder is useful in this regard. Apparently, working at McKinsey or Bain or one of the other large "prestigious" consulting firms is also a good move. Going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford or similar univerisities is almost a hard requirement. Almost[1]. Or, in the rarest of events, found a business that is successful and somehow manages to get big enough that you get status by proxy. In any case, sans the last (and rarest) way, you'll have to walk the walk and talk the talk. It can get unsavory. [0]: Oligarchy and Plutocracy fit too. Take your pick. To grossly oversimplify: If you're part of the Aristrocratic families (Rockefellers, Dursts etc) thats one way. Another is via being apart of the oligarchy (corporate power is alive and well. from oil companies to big tech) which is often intertwined with aristrocratic insitutions (Harvard, Yale etc). Finally, of course, you have the mesh of percentage at the top that fall into Plutocracy, which are wealthy and powerful themselves but are in service of even wealthier and more powerful oligarchs and artistrocrats in many cases. [1]: Somehow around the edges you can find your way into it without this, but its challenging to say the least. Usually (but not entirely) its due to the rarest case, being a successful entreprenuer and surviving long enough to be recongized by proxy. Though, sometimes servant becomes the master. See outside executive recruiting
- VirusNewbie 3y agoIt seems like we could check this. Is your hypothesis that an outsized number of SVP/EVP at top paying tech companies are going to be from either dynastic wealth or from traditional Ivy backgrounds?
- no_wizard 3y ago
- lanewinfield 3y agoThe American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year is... "enshittification" https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/ https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...
- adamredwoods 3y agoI wished they co-slanged it as "encrapification" because NPR did a report on it and did not mention the word on air. I think it's a valuable web-evolution term.
- ericmcer 3y agoWith the amount of layoffs tech has had in the last year I imagine attrition is less of an issue. Maybe they factored that in.
- matchbok 3y agoThe real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?
- hock_ads_ad_hoc 3y agoLeeches, arbitraging the labor of the actual, real workers.
- Daz1 3y agoLow IQ opinion
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThe unequal partner in a near/actual exploitative working arrangement
- matchbok 3y agoPlease read Business 101 sweet child.
- BizarreByte 3y agoOverpaid parasites in a lot of cases.
- matchbok 3y agoGreat, if you can do the job, feel free to apply.
- BizarreByte 3y agoPlease, I'm not in the right class nor do I have the right family to get such a position. Are you a C-level exec? It's strange to me when working class people defend them.
- huytersd 3y agoThey’ll probably give them all chatGPT subscriptions and ask them to deal with it. If that goes well they’ll probably cut the staff in half again.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoOr dogfood their Amazon Q AI
- neom 3y agoNot an engineer so I'm curious... Is this actually a thing that's happening in Eng orgs these days?
- sneed_chucker 3y agoCan't speak for other places, but at Meta everyone effectively has a free GPT4 subscription.
- huytersd 3y agoIf you’re an eng and not using ChatGPT/copilot you’re going to get left behind pretty soon.
- password54321 3y agoSure, if you are doing unoriginal low quality work.
- golly_ned 3y agoIt's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong about something that I can easily see and point out and often verify by finding documentation or testing. I don't know how many times I've asked a question and told the wrong thing.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> It's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong There is no GPT-4.5. Current OpenAI GPT models include various date and context-size checkpoints of 3.5-turbo, 4, and (in preview) 4-turbo.
- seoulmetro 3y ago[flagged]
- aaomidi 3y agoThis is the best substantive response I can give to this: lol
- golly_ned 3y agoWhat makes you think the workload at Twitch must be minimal?
- seoulmetro 3y agoWhat makes me think this? Well to start, the app does not change, it's core product is old and it is a piece of finished product to do a very physical thing. All this said, they have way too many people for this. It ain't rocket science to know why tech hires (and fires) too many people.
- llm_nerd 3y agoThis sort of comment always seems to be made based on the idea that Twitch was 1430 employees all writing HTML or something. In reality it's a company that operates around the world across an enormous number of jurisdictions, dealing with governments and censorship and laws and regulations. That has a significant legal operation, a significant moderation operation, and deals with payments to many streamers, again in many jurisdictions. The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Twitch has seen collapsing revenue and they need to right-size, but these sort of peanut gallery "hurrr how can they have so many employees" narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled.
- seoulmetro 3y agoYeah no one thinks Twitch employees are writing HTML. Especially not on a programmers forum... I took into account it's worldwide stage. >The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Not really. Contract work exists for new market capture. >narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled. Not misled at all. It's very much a reality. It only upsets those who are part of waste.
- matrix_overload 3y agoPeople fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic. As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.
- aaomidi 3y agoThat is true for some teams, not true for others. I've never seen a layoff actually care about what team they're removing from when it comes to ENG. In this case it's probably 500 across twitch, which for some teams is going to be devastating.
- refulgentis 3y agoThe problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms. Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negotiate" in an airy high-minded vague sense of "negotiate but don't", sure. At the end of the day these moves, whether intended to or not, leave less room for negotiation.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- itsdrewmiller 3y ago
- whatyesaid 3y agoYou're overestimating things like Twitter and Twitch. The reason these layoffs can occur is that these products are solidified, you can't really improve them much, there's not much real work there. And Twitter apparently had 20 million lines of microservices so it's not like their engineers were doing a good job, despite it being a legacy codebase, all they shipped for 10 years was 1 major redesign and Spaces + NFTs before Dorsey was fully out. That said if they fired the report moderation team then yes it scales linearly.
- soared 3y agoThe consumer facing product is closer to solidified, but advertising, moderation, etc features need to change over time.
- Daz1 3y agoNow they'll have to jiggle their mouse to appear online twice as often!
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoHmm, 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.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- jrockway 3y agoI doubt it matters. They wanted to be big in Korea. Local competitors got big instead. So they're leaving instead of spending more money. Interest rates could be 0% and you still wouldn't necessarily want to borrow money to bail out a sub-business that doesn't work.
- stets 3y agoThey are preventing boobs? Have you ever taken a look at Twitch's Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches category? They are complicit in encouraging showing boobs
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou must have missed all the recent news and controversy lately.
- mardifoufs 3y agoWhy is it good? Because corporations fire their employees? Not sure why that would be good for most people unless you are the FED lol
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYes. 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.
- IshanMi 3y agoFor companies like Twitch or Kick, how much do layoffs like these affect the actual streamers? (Like are the layoffs usually accompanied by them reducing the streamer's revenue share, or things like that?)
- wilde 3y agoRight before this they chose to exit Korea. https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-korea/ https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
- cloogshicer 3y agoInteresting. Is it true what they claim? Why is it so much more costly for them to operate in Korea?
- dmoy 3y agoKorea changed the pricing model for network traffic to be "sending party pays". For something like OGN that has a literal TV channel it's less of an issue, but for something like twitch that is only Internet, and tons of video, it's more difficult.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago>Korea changed the pricing model for network traffic to be "sending party pays". the pricing model for network traffic to be "sending party pays by volume" and "receiving party pays flat rate".
- fivre 3y agothat has nothing to do with staffing. Korea has a uniquely hostile ISP market where service providers want to charge foreign services ridiculous amounts (versus peering agreements in most markets) for access to Korean consumer networks
- 3y ago
- shrewduser 3y agoAny idea why south korea is particularly cost prohibitive? i would assume twitch would be very keen to have a presence there.
- unexpected 3y agonot an expert, but have read that South Korea's ISP's get to charge Twitch for the bandwidth they consume (no net neutrality). RIP.
- lolinder 3y agoThis was discussed here [0]. The tl;dr is that South Korea has the opposite of net neutrality: instead of charging the consumer for excess bandwidth, they charge the service providers. Streaming video is extremely bandwidth-intensive, so Twitch can't afford to keep streaming if they're charged for every GB. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167
- Rebelgecko 3y agohttps://carnegieendowment.org/2021/08/17/afterword-korea-s-challenge-to-standard-internet-interconnection-model-pub-85166 https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/08/17/afterword-korea-s-c... tl;dr is that SK has some big fees for data users that have a disproportionate impact on non-Korean companies
- no_wizard 3y agoWouldn't the work around then be for Twitch to do a 49-51 split with a South Korean ISP to get favortism? These entrenchment laws are there to favor the big ISPs in SK, it would stand to reason that they would be happy to make money in such an arrangement, and Twitch gets a secondary downstream benefits that they can reap.
- zztop44 3y agoThere’s a good chance someone already had this idea, explored it, and found a reason why it can’t work.
- raz32dust 3y agoI 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 insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business. [1] https://backlinko.com/twitch-users https://backlinko.com/twitch-users
- nicce 3y agoMore profits. Simple as that.
- minimaxir 3y agoEven in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak. A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong. EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.
- chalsprhebaodu 3y ago[flagged]
- minimaxir 3y agoHence the implied "something with the business is fundamentally wrong".
- iwontberude 3y agoHow do you counter the argument by restating a premise of their argument? Are you implying Twitch is profitable because I'm pretty sure it is not.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoMaybe they're unwinding some over hiring from when interest rates were low.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoUnity and Twitch doing massive layoffs to start the year? I feel somewhat nervous being in video game adjacent SaaS
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TillE 3y agoI saw some hysterical Twitter thread a couple days ago claiming that the end of AAA games was nigh. There are some weird vibes out there. It's absolutely true that there have been a ton of layoffs in the past ~12 months. But I've seen zero evidence of actual sales slowing down. 2023 saw a ton of big hits, from Zelda to Diablo to Baldur's Gate.
- kobalsky 3y ago> that the end of AAA games was nigh this kind of running-it-dry is what is killing "AAA" (big quotes) games: https://en.as.com/meristation/news/ubisoft-has-11-assassins-creed-games-in-the-works-n/ https://en.as.com/meristation/news/ubisoft-has-11-assassins-...
- Tiktaalik 3y agoso much of game dev is work for hire that if the big publicly traded companies tap the breaks on things for a few months to mull over market direction or to make their stock price look better, it doesn't mean anything for the publishers, but results in a wave of game cancelations and layoffs for the tiny work for hire studios way down the line. That's what is happening right now. May well be that in 2025/2026 we see a light year of releases.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe AAA gaming economics are a different issue: budgets have ballooned so much that it's near impossible to hit breakeven. The games you mentioned are extreme outliers (no one expected BG3 to do as well as it did), and there have been a number of studio-killing bombs this year.
- theythem 3y agoAI is taking over. Simple as that $$$
- sylware 3y ago35% of twitch is 500 employees, so few?? Oo I dunno why I was thinking twitch to be much bigger... when you look at unity which was 7000...
- aaomidi 3y agoWell, keep in mind that a lot of the ops is AWS.
- pcurve 3y ago1600 ish down to 1100. That's a big percentage cut, but not a big number cut. I'm surprised they're not just letting natural attrition run its course.
- thih9 3y agoWeird to see layoffs at the beginning of the year, when fresh budgets and plans are availiable. Then again, since this is happening this early, this is probably a 2023 decision.
- pb7 3y agoIf they had done this in December, people would be outraged that they're laying off right before the holidays. January is fine (if one thinks layoffs are fine in general).
- rapfaria 3y agoDon't U.S companies have their fiscal year wrapped around June?
- NegativeK 3y agoUS companies can define their own fiscal year.
- peruvian 3y agoI was laid of January 2023 and looking back, it was decided in late November/early December. I even remember a managers/CTO-only meeting during an engineering-wide offsite that reeked of secrecy/sketchiness.
- tiffanyh 3y agoIs Section 174 a driver for these layoffs? It now eliminates the ability for businesses to deduct their R&D expenditures as an expense. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-23-08.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-23-08.pdf
- mullingitover 3y agoIt doesn't eliminate it, just eliminates the ability to realize it 100% up front. Now, it has to be amortized over five years for domestic companies, 15 years for foreign companies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI can’t imagine this would be an issue for a trillion dollar company
- stock_toaster 3y agoI wondered about this as well. Another article I ran across: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
- brandensilva 3y agoWorse change in startup history while we are in an high borrowing rate in an inflationary environment with limited capital.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoSection 174 usually is more of an issue for smaller/private companies. On the contrary, when I worked for a bigger company, we specifically tried to capitalize as much software development costs as possible, because it makes the company look more profitable. We (all of the software engineers) hated this because, for an internet-facing company that does continuous deployment, bucketing "new work" into CapEx vs "maintenance" into OpEx is nearly impossible when you're just adding new features to an existing product over time.
- lchengify 3y agoNot 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, 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. If you're pushing that much live video you really need to find a business model that works, especially when Youtube arguably does it better. Kind of surprised it took this long to start to wind it down. [1] https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20210924/amp?f=4 https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20210924/amp?f=4
- raxxorraxor 3y agoThere is a difference in the target demographic though. Even if the most successful channels aren't about videogames, it is the target audience. That is different for TikTok and Youtube with heavy implication about how profitable advertising can be.
- lakomen 3y agoWhat are you talking about? Every single Twitch streamer in my list is profitable. Twitch gets 50% of each subscription. 1 subscription per streamer. You have to subscribe to each streamer individually. Egress is a fixed cost. You pay flat rate for 10GE or 40GE or 100GE. Then people buy virtual currency (bits) so they can "support" their streamers. Some people dump huge amounts of money to be displayed on top of some monthly donation list. I've seen some guy dump $5k every few minutes to some travel streamer. I guess that's what the *coin money gets spent on. Twitch aka Amazon is surely not losing money. Then add the annoying ads every so often. Sometimes up to 20 ads in a row. Ridiculous.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt'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.
- jron 3y agoI frequently kept a twitch pop-out in the corner of my screen throughout the day. When uBlock stopped working, I almost immediately stopped using the site. Video interruptions are pretty awful for live content where channel switching is a regular occurrence.
- symlinkk 3y agoSounds like a win for Twitch - you were costing them money and not giving anything back
- jron 3y agoThey lost about $20-40 a month on me alone. There are far more channels than a single person could possibly subscribe to...
- anonymousab 3y agoThey may have been paying for subscriptions, bit rewards/redemptions, prime, etc. Ads are only one source of Twitch's revenue. Twitch started showing a purple "disable your ad blocker" screen when a block of ads failed to run. I think they probably would have made a lot more money and reduced a lot of churn by simply advertising Turbo instead, which many users don't even know is an option.
- stevenwliao 3y agoTwitch subs remove ads for subscribed channels, so OP doesn't buy subs. Which is the more likely scenario? 1. OP buys bits and throws them at their favorite streamers despite not being willing to pay for subscriptions. 2. OP pays nothing for Twitch and doesn't watch a single ad.
- pugworthy 3y agoThat's why you subscribe to the channel you like - or use Twitch Prime if you have Prime.
- 3y ago
- lgkk 3y agoMaybe this will be a good time to remove the X rated and otherwise gross content (there are other sites for this kind of stuff) and focus on the core experience. Just kidding. They will probably double down on it and make it a onlyfans lite.
- pugworthy 3y agoMaybe go read their policy at https://safety.twitch.tv/s/article/Sexual-Content-Policy-Update?language=en_US https://safety.twitch.tv/s/article/Sexual-Content-Policy-Upd... And if you find something you think breaks that, report it.
- bakugo 3y agoI've been watching Twitch less and less over the years as the site has slowly drifted away from its original purpose and become more and more infested with boring IRL streams and e-girls who only use it to advertise their onlyfans, effectively driving traffic off site (and who are, for some reason, allowed to stream half naked on a site full of children). I wonder if it's just me, or if this is part of the reason for the userbase's stagnation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hindsightbias 3y agoWonder if a Twitch + OnlyFans merger would work.
- kypro 3y agoThat's a sizeable cut... So much for those hoping the tech job market would recover in 2024. So far this year we've already had another couple thousand back in the job market – a market that expanded by just 700 jobs in 2023.
- gverrilla 3y agotwitch should focus on sports and esports, and not on fan-based communities which are so cringe with personalized emotes and whatnot. turbo should be cheaper for international audience. high-quality live video should be paid. everybody else should get pseudo-live video. it should make partnerships and deals both with gaming and sports companies (and platforms like Steam) and sports/e-sports event companies. they should also stop promoting amazon, it was very boring when every streamer was selling that amazon prime bullshit instead of giving me content. I would pay to watch twitch, but not monthly as I only care about a few events a year for the game I like to watch (counter-strike).
- coffeebeqn 3y agoEsports so far has been a terrible business. No one wants to pay PPV for vidya games when you can watch so much of that for free. And most orgs have failed to find any real means of revenue. Just one example the Overwatch league that required millions invested to own a team is being shut down
- gverrilla 3y agoEsports is at it's infancy, but increasing in size and developing. But yeah they would have to innovate, and would be a challenge. And have a focused strategy. Is there any other segment where Twitch currently holds an advantageous position? Counter-strike majors are mainly watched through twitch even though steam offers in-game streams.
- azemetre 3y agoEsports has been a thing since the 90s with Quake and Unreal tournaments. I agree with the other poster, Esports isn’t a massive money maker like how the world championships for scrabble aren’t a massive money maker either. It’s extremely niche and the audience demographics are mostly poor, it’s not a boon you think it is. You can be smart about it like Valve and Riot or you can be stupid about it like Blizzard and Faze. Although Faze seems to be smart in how stupid the execution was. If esports couldn’t make it during the pandemic, I doubt it would make it now when money is very expensive.
- MrFoof 3y agoI honestly wonder how the softcore content works out in terms of impacting Twitch's balance sheet. I'm not interested in it, but I'm not against it. Yet I genuinely question how it works in Twitch's favor in any material way. Basically, I look at the softcore streams as those streamers using Twitch as a platform to provide additional content for no meaningful capital cost to the themselves (the streamers, not Twitch). It's basically a free additional discovery and advertising channel to attract new users to their core monetization platform (like OnlyFans) where they make their actual money. Twitch is basically giving them a free platform to direct most of the money to another platform, not to Twitch. So where is Twitch making real money in that? If you're telling me through subs and bits, you're out of your mind, because that's peanuts compared to what those gals are getting from their OnlyFans, merch, other donation platforms, etc. They're snatching up nickels while the comparative money firehose is pointed elsewhere, all while diluting their brand at least a bit. Granted, I feel they need to expand their audience regardless out of the video game niche, but I question if this has been materially moving the needle. ----- Don't even get me started on the other core issues. The abhorrent recommendations and difficulty of discovery, the inadequate monetization options for streamers, the limited number of advertisers and where I only get recommended product categories (like energy drinks) I have never bought in my existence, etc.
- saghm 3y ago> So where is Twitch making real money in that? If you're telling me through subs and bits, you're out of your mind, because that's peanuts compared to what those gals are getting from their OnlyFans, merch, other donation platforms, etc. I don't really understand this logic. The fact that they make more money somewhere else means that they should have to somehow give that money to Twitch as well? If Twitch isn't set up to be able to make a profit from subs and bits, that sounds like an issue with their business model, and they should find a better way to monetize users on their site. From some very basic searching, it looks like there are NBA, MLB, and NFL players who stream on Twitch, as well as professional musicians and actors, and I imagine most of them aren't making the majority of their income on Twitch either, so should Twitch be trying to get a cut of their product endorsement deals and other sources of income that come from being famous? I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong that that Twitch is losing money on them, but I don't really see how that's something specific to one type of streamer. If the issue is the ratio of subscribers/donations to the number of people watching those streams, why not just make policies about that specifically, like putting limits on how frequently someone can stream after a certain number of hours without having a certain amount of revenue either via subs/donations or showing ads? I think they'd make much more effective strides towards profitability focusing on stuff like that.
- dev_tty01 3y agoSorry to hear about the job losses, but what's a Twitch? I am being facetious of course, but I honestly haven't heard of anyone using Twitch in quite a while. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it doesn't seem to have much mind share anymore. Hope they all find better positions soon.
- GreedClarifies 3y agoWhat does Amazon use for their ads network? My guess is that it just isn't competitive and so Twitch can't monetize. Or maybe it is the demographic. But the ads network is my first guess.
- hoofhearted 3y agoThey use the Amazon Advertising Network. Their advertising machine is third largest revenue generator next to sellers fees and AWS.
- GreedClarifies 3y agoIIUC their advertising machine isn't quite as general as the networks of Google and Meta, and gains a large portion of its revenue from ads on Amazon Retail, which may not be competitive. It's a guess as to the root cause.
- sytelus 3y agoUnity is doing 25% layoff. Some other company laid off all 200 employees. What’s going on suddenly? Did the holiday earnings sucked for tech? Is it new tax laws?
- password54321 3y agoCould be the result of hiring bunch of mediocre developers that are getting pumped out of universities these days.