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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.

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, 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 ago
There 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 ago
What 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 ago
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.
- rabuse 3y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    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.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  I’d love to know more about this backstory.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I wrote that up years ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/ Enjoy!
    - kridsdale1 3y ago
      Cheers
Grimblewald 3y ago
not to mention new user experience. I've tried to use twitch, several times. Each time I am bombareded with tasks to do and things to click, when really I just want to do what I came for - watch some videos. Youtube and tiktok do that, no BS just here's your videos.
- BonitaPersona 3y ago
  absolutely agree, and that's why I always look out for alternatives like safetwitch, or nitter for twitter
wnevets 3y ago
How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  By spending too much on their execs
- lchengify 3y ago
  I am supremely curious about this myself. My guess would be their ad spend is bad in comparison to the other networks (Google, Facebook, TikTok). Could be because their audience isn't worth as much, could be because the ad formats are bad, could be because they can't get advertisers. But unless they are serving ads from Google's network, my guess is they are 4th place at best. As noted on other threads, their streaming infrastructure must be a burning dumpster fire of money. Live streaming is super hard since you can't edge cache it, and it requires actual hard computer engineering to make work. If a mere mortal company were to try to run a clone of Twitch on AWS, it would run out of money in days. It also likely uses the same hardware as other high-value products, such as AI.
  - nathants 3y ago
    kick.com is trying to run a clone of twitch on aws for a while now. too soon to tell.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Running on VC money? AWS sounds like a terrible place to host your live streaming infrastructure unless cost is irrelevant
      - cavisne 3y ago
        No they run on online casino money, the founders own Stake.com
hot_gril 3y ago
I imagine live video is a lot more expensive too. Can't just throw that on a CDN. And unlike YT or TikTok videos with sort of a time limit, Twitch streams can run for hours, chewing up bandwidth while so many "viewers" are giving divided attention at best.
- itsTyrion 3y ago
  exactly. Let's assume 1k viewers and 2/3 of them watching on 'source' quality, which is usually 6 mbps. In this scenario, we're looking at 4 Gbps or 500 MB/s. For a 4h long stream that's 7.2TB! of bandwidth, just for one streamer, excluding the viewers on lower quality
- mikeryan 3y ago
  You can absolutely throw live video on a CDN at which point the bandwidth cost is the same as on demand video. The real-time encoding costs are the real issue.
  - goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
    The cache TTL on VOD is significantly higher, so your whole infrastructure needs to have a live origin, which gets hit repeatedly to get the latest fragments/segments from the origin, from multiple edges/midgresses. I find that our origin consumes an order of magnitude more CPU than transcoding and packaging for live once you have even a couple of thousand live viewers and when serving LL-HLS/ll-dash with a low fragment size it increases more. if you are latency sensitive then i between caching layers are not an option.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- timr 3y ago
  > Can't just throw that on a CDN. You'd be surprised. I have no idea what Twitch does now, but when it was JTV, we had quite a bit of our streaming video on CDNs. We built a complex infrastructure to arbitrage bandwidth. But yeah, if you do it naïvely, you'll hemorrhage money.
kenhwang 3y ago
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 video streaming service with "just throw the video on a CDN" as the strategy, you have to be the CDN because at the scale you're operating at, you'll be murdered by external CDN costs. But you're also correct that Twitch's content makes it incredibly hard to serve cheaply. Same reason why Mixer (competitor by Microsoft) folded so quickly and Facebook Gaming and Youtube Streaming have been neglected projects since launch. There's only two viable video streaming business models right now: your content is essentially free (TikTok/Snap/Instagram), or your bandwidth is essentially free (HBO before the divorce with AT&T, maybe Comcast-Peacock+). Netflix sorta had near free content for a while before the studios cut them off. I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not. Twitch seems to pay normal rates for AWS. And they are around the profit-zone for several years now it seems, just not making big money. So they are in fact very profitable, just not for Twitch, but for AWS and Amazon.
- fer 3y ago
  > 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.
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    I found this: https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure-at-twitch/ https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure...
npalli 3y ago
>> 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.
- Jommi 3y ago
  He actually left Twitch pretty early on though.
- ProxCoques 3y ago
  > 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.
  - valval 3y ago
    I think it’s fair to say you’re not the type to ever run a business, successful or not, with that attitude.
- tempestn 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind being advised by someone who created a business and sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars, lack of profitability notwithstanding.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion
    - tempestn 3y ago
tempestn 3y ago
The majority of Twitch's costs are going to be revenue to AWS; I wonder if they are still unprofitable if you include the AWS earnings on those services. Or in other words, if AWS hosts Twitch at cost, is it profitable then? If so, or if it's even close, the business would still have value to them. Maybe this layoff is intended to get there.
- spenczar5 3y ago
  Twitch’s video infra is not on AWS. Only the non-video stuff is. Video and networking costs a lot.
  - tempestn 3y ago
    Oh, that's surprising. It's in-house then? I can't imagine they'd be paying a non-AWS provider.
    - spenczar5 3y ago
      Yes, it was a complicated part of the acquisition. Twitch owns a lot of hardware and has it in colos all over the place. There are some control plane components in AWS but those are relatively small.
ayberk 3y ago
I'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself. This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tournaments to move to a better platform.
- itsTyrion 3y ago
  that 6 mbps for every viewer ain't paying for itself
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  I watch starcraft on twitch but can never watch it live. It'll get to a crucial moment and then a 3 minute commercial interrupts. Literally the game is over at that point. No point to watch. They'd have done better with some sort of integrated commercials or banner bar or something else. Or even just buffering those 3 minutes. So I do watch on twitch but I wait till the match is over. What also sucks about twitch is you can't rewind. So many problems there
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    Twitch allows streamers quite a bit of control over when and how ads run, including manually triggering them. As long as they run a certain number of ads per hour, you don't see a preroll. The streamer you were watching didn't bother to reduce ads to short 15 second chunks or run them manually during slow points like sitting in-queue.
  - belltaco 3y ago
    You can sub to the channel or get Twitch Turbo to remove ads. One sub is free if you have Amazon Prime.
    - DoesntMatter22 3y ago
      If I have to pay then I might as well wait for the vod
wozniacki 3y ago
Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2] Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there. In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. They rode the woke train as hard as they could and it was a sight to behold! They've recently slightly relaxed some of their disallowed content policies. [1] Kick - Statistics & Facts https://www.statista.com/topics/11394/kick/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/11394/kick/#topicOverview [2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/kick.com/ https://www.similarweb.com/website/kick.com/
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  Does this read like an ad to anyone else?
- rchaud 3y ago
  Ad-free....for now. Like how Uber sold itself on "no need to tip" and there's a big fat tip screen on the App.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I doubt kick is making a profit either
- raydev 3y ago
  Remains to be seen whether Kick can last long enough to get to profitability. It's certainly advertiser-poison, since what you call "draconian content policing" is closer to what advertisers want to see.
- dathinab 3y ago
  Kick has the same cost or more then Twitch (they use the exact same infrastructure under the hood,it's a service sold by Amazone to Twitch and others). They saved some cost on building the UI etc. by well semi-stealing it from Twitch after a leak but that's just a saving bootstrapping cost not long term operation cost. When it comes to general advertisement friendliness they are far worse then Twitch, i.e. where Twitch struggles to sell AD slots Kick probably wouldn't even bother. Like many other start up like companies Kick is not currently profitable and lives from investor capital hoping to make it through. Kick is deeply intertwined with gambling and many streamers on it frequently are in legal gray area when it comes to gambling law in the EU, they tried to somewhat get way from it but AFIK failed for now. Kick has many streamers which are often seen as ethical problematic, like being associated with neo-Nazis, making it a no go for most advertisers. But also many streamers stay away from it for that reason and also (maybe more so) the gambling reason. So AFIK Kick isn't likely to make it longer, except maybe as legally and ethically questionable gambling paltform.
nstart 3y ago
I haven’t looked at TikTok streaming but it would make sense if this has risen strongly. Twitch’s biggest category became “just chatting”. This was always a category ripe for being stolen by someone else on its own. If TikTok streaming is rising, I’m wondering if they have eaten into the just charting category growth.
mikepurvis 3y ago
I'm shocked it's not profitable. I've watched a person close to me spend $100/mo buying bits and get back nothing more than a few reaction emotes and jumpscares. Twitch's take on that is 50% isn't it? How on earth is it not profitable running a marketplace with those parameters and so many whales spending compulsively for a few seconds of attention from their favourite streamer?
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  Roughly spoken, there are 5-10 million active streamers, but only 5-10k who even make a significant amount of money. So even while most of them neither see a relevant number of viewers, or any viewer at all, they still create a huge baseline of costs just by existing and streaming.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Any interaction attempt with big streamers is worthless - like holding up a letter-sized note to someone driving past you at 80 mph.
- ta_1138 3y ago
  What nobody tells you is that the cost of hosting all that content, and streaming it live with little lag, is far more expensive than many would guess. Netflix can have boxes with cached content very near you, and your ISP even likes it, as the most streamed content tends to be the same for many users. On Twitch, it's not so easy: You really want everyone to be seeing things with minimal lag, so they can spend all that money buying bits. Other streaming services, which can use all of the tricks to save bandwidth and compute, have eye-watering AWS costs. Even with their high take rates, I bet there's a lot of streamers that, once accounting for their share of infra costs, end up losing twitch money.
- no_carrier 3y ago
  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.
firecall 3y ago
Adding to that, I was watching Doug DeMuros round on YouTube the other day. He noted that his views were down, and he likely suspected some of his audience had moved to TikTok. Or something along those lines :-) Doug is a massive Car Review YouTuber - maybe the biggest? I can’t imagine seeking out the same content I get on YouTube but on TikTok. But then it’s not content I guess, it’s attention. Is TikTok just stealing attention and will watch anything that served to them on the platform they happen to on that day. Makes you wonder how much power personalities actually have :-/
DanielHB 3y ago
Consider that "unprofitable" quote includes the fact that Twitch probably gets AWS compute at cost (Amazon subsidies Twitch server costs)

raxxorraxor 3y ago

There 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 ago

What 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 ago

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.

rabuse 3y ago
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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  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.
kridsdale1 3y ago
I’d love to know more about this backstory.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I wrote that up years ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/ Enjoy!
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    Cheers

Grimblewald 3y ago

not to mention new user experience. I've tried to use twitch, several times. Each time I am bombareded with tasks to do and things to click, when really I just want to do what I came for - watch some videos. Youtube and tiktok do that, no BS just here's your videos.

BonitaPersona 3y ago
absolutely agree, and that's why I always look out for alternatives like safetwitch, or nitter for twitter

wnevets 3y ago

How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?

nine_zeros 3y ago
By spending too much on their execs
lchengify 3y ago
I am supremely curious about this myself. My guess would be their ad spend is bad in comparison to the other networks (Google, Facebook, TikTok). Could be because their audience isn't worth as much, could be because the ad formats are bad, could be because they can't get advertisers. But unless they are serving ads from Google's network, my guess is they are 4th place at best. As noted on other threads, their streaming infrastructure must be a burning dumpster fire of money. Live streaming is super hard since you can't edge cache it, and it requires actual hard computer engineering to make work. If a mere mortal company were to try to run a clone of Twitch on AWS, it would run out of money in days. It also likely uses the same hardware as other high-value products, such as AI.
- nathants 3y ago
  kick.com is trying to run a clone of twitch on aws for a while now. too soon to tell.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Running on VC money? AWS sounds like a terrible place to host your live streaming infrastructure unless cost is irrelevant
    - cavisne 3y ago
      No they run on online casino money, the founders own Stake.com

hot_gril 3y ago

I imagine live video is a lot more expensive too. Can't just throw that on a CDN. And unlike YT or TikTok videos with sort of a time limit, Twitch streams can run for hours, chewing up bandwidth while so many "viewers" are giving divided attention at best.

itsTyrion 3y ago
exactly. Let's assume 1k viewers and 2/3 of them watching on 'source' quality, which is usually 6 mbps. In this scenario, we're looking at 4 Gbps or 500 MB/s. For a 4h long stream that's 7.2TB! of bandwidth, just for one streamer, excluding the viewers on lower quality
mikeryan 3y ago
You can absolutely throw live video on a CDN at which point the bandwidth cost is the same as on demand video. The real-time encoding costs are the real issue.
- goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
  The cache TTL on VOD is significantly higher, so your whole infrastructure needs to have a live origin, which gets hit repeatedly to get the latest fragments/segments from the origin, from multiple edges/midgresses. I find that our origin consumes an order of magnitude more CPU than transcoding and packaging for live once you have even a couple of thousand live viewers and when serving LL-HLS/ll-dash with a low fragment size it increases more. if you are latency sensitive then i between caching layers are not an option.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
timr 3y ago
> Can't just throw that on a CDN. You'd be surprised. I have no idea what Twitch does now, but when it was JTV, we had quite a bit of our streaming video on CDNs. We built a complex infrastructure to arbitrage bandwidth. But yeah, if you do it naïvely, you'll hemorrhage money.

kenhwang 3y ago

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 video streaming service with "just throw the video on a CDN" as the strategy, you have to be the CDN because at the scale you're operating at, you'll be murdered by external CDN costs. But you're also correct that Twitch's content makes it incredibly hard to serve cheaply. Same reason why Mixer (competitor by Microsoft) folded so quickly and Facebook Gaming and Youtube Streaming have been neglected projects since launch. There's only two viable video streaming business models right now: your content is essentially free (TikTok/Snap/Instagram), or your bandwidth is essentially free (HBO before the divorce with AT&T, maybe Comcast-Peacock+). Netflix sorta had near free content for a while before the studios cut them off. I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
> I think Amazon was betting that AWS efficiencies could push Twitch into profitability, guess not. Twitch seems to pay normal rates for AWS. And they are around the profit-zone for several years now it seems, just not making big money. So they are in fact very profitable, just not for Twitch, but for AWS and Amazon.
fer 3y ago
> 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.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  I found this: https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure-at-twitch/ https://scaleyourapp.com/live-video-streaming-infrastructure...

npalli 3y ago

>> 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.

Jommi 3y ago
He actually left Twitch pretty early on though.
ProxCoques 3y ago
> 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.
- valval 3y ago
  I think it’s fair to say you’re not the type to ever run a business, successful or not, with that attitude.
tempestn 3y ago
I wouldn't mind being advised by someone who created a business and sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars, lack of profitability notwithstanding.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion
  - tempestn 3y ago

tempestn 3y ago

The majority of Twitch's costs are going to be revenue to AWS; I wonder if they are still unprofitable if you include the AWS earnings on those services. Or in other words, if AWS hosts Twitch at cost, is it profitable then? If so, or if it's even close, the business would still have value to them. Maybe this layoff is intended to get there.

spenczar5 3y ago
Twitch’s video infra is not on AWS. Only the non-video stuff is. Video and networking costs a lot.
- tempestn 3y ago
  Oh, that's surprising. It's in-house then? I can't imagine they'd be paying a non-AWS provider.
  - spenczar5 3y ago
    Yes, it was a complicated part of the acquisition. Twitch owns a lot of hardware and has it in colos all over the place. There are some control plane components in AWS but those are relatively small.

ayberk 3y ago

I'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself. This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tournaments to move to a better platform.

itsTyrion 3y ago
that 6 mbps for every viewer ain't paying for itself
DoesntMatter22 3y ago
I watch starcraft on twitch but can never watch it live. It'll get to a crucial moment and then a 3 minute commercial interrupts. Literally the game is over at that point. No point to watch. They'd have done better with some sort of integrated commercials or banner bar or something else. Or even just buffering those 3 minutes. So I do watch on twitch but I wait till the match is over. What also sucks about twitch is you can't rewind. So many problems there
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Twitch allows streamers quite a bit of control over when and how ads run, including manually triggering them. As long as they run a certain number of ads per hour, you don't see a preroll. The streamer you were watching didn't bother to reduce ads to short 15 second chunks or run them manually during slow points like sitting in-queue.
- belltaco 3y ago
  You can sub to the channel or get Twitch Turbo to remove ads. One sub is free if you have Amazon Prime.
  - DoesntMatter22 3y ago
    If I have to pay then I might as well wait for the vod

wozniacki 3y ago

Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2] Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there. In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. They rode the woke train as hard as they could and it was a sight to behold! They've recently slightly relaxed some of their disallowed content policies. [1] Kick - Statistics & Facts https://www.statista.com/topics/11394/kick/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/11394/kick/#topicOverview [2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/kick.com/ https://www.similarweb.com/website/kick.com/

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Does this read like an ad to anyone else?
rchaud 3y ago
Ad-free....for now. Like how Uber sold itself on "no need to tip" and there's a big fat tip screen on the App.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
I doubt kick is making a profit either
raydev 3y ago
Remains to be seen whether Kick can last long enough to get to profitability. It's certainly advertiser-poison, since what you call "draconian content policing" is closer to what advertisers want to see.
dathinab 3y ago
Kick has the same cost or more then Twitch (they use the exact same infrastructure under the hood,it's a service sold by Amazone to Twitch and others). They saved some cost on building the UI etc. by well semi-stealing it from Twitch after a leak but that's just a saving bootstrapping cost not long term operation cost. When it comes to general advertisement friendliness they are far worse then Twitch, i.e. where Twitch struggles to sell AD slots Kick probably wouldn't even bother. Like many other start up like companies Kick is not currently profitable and lives from investor capital hoping to make it through. Kick is deeply intertwined with gambling and many streamers on it frequently are in legal gray area when it comes to gambling law in the EU, they tried to somewhat get way from it but AFIK failed for now. Kick has many streamers which are often seen as ethical problematic, like being associated with neo-Nazis, making it a no go for most advertisers. But also many streamers stay away from it for that reason and also (maybe more so) the gambling reason. So AFIK Kick isn't likely to make it longer, except maybe as legally and ethically questionable gambling paltform.

nstart 3y ago

I haven’t looked at TikTok streaming but it would make sense if this has risen strongly. Twitch’s biggest category became “just chatting”. This was always a category ripe for being stolen by someone else on its own. If TikTok streaming is rising, I’m wondering if they have eaten into the just charting category growth.

mikepurvis 3y ago

I'm shocked it's not profitable. I've watched a person close to me spend $100/mo buying bits and get back nothing more than a few reaction emotes and jumpscares. Twitch's take on that is 50% isn't it? How on earth is it not profitable running a marketplace with those parameters and so many whales spending compulsively for a few seconds of attention from their favourite streamer?

PurpleRamen 3y ago
Roughly spoken, there are 5-10 million active streamers, but only 5-10k who even make a significant amount of money. So even while most of them neither see a relevant number of viewers, or any viewer at all, they still create a huge baseline of costs just by existing and streaming.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
Any interaction attempt with big streamers is worthless - like holding up a letter-sized note to someone driving past you at 80 mph.
ta_1138 3y ago
What nobody tells you is that the cost of hosting all that content, and streaming it live with little lag, is far more expensive than many would guess. Netflix can have boxes with cached content very near you, and your ISP even likes it, as the most streamed content tends to be the same for many users. On Twitch, it's not so easy: You really want everyone to be seeing things with minimal lag, so they can spend all that money buying bits. Other streaming services, which can use all of the tricks to save bandwidth and compute, have eye-watering AWS costs. Even with their high take rates, I bet there's a lot of streamers that, once accounting for their share of infra costs, end up losing twitch money.
no_carrier 3y ago
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.

firecall 3y ago

Adding to that, I was watching Doug DeMuros round on YouTube the other day. He noted that his views were down, and he likely suspected some of his audience had moved to TikTok. Or something along those lines :-) Doug is a massive Car Review YouTuber - maybe the biggest? I can’t imagine seeking out the same content I get on YouTube but on TikTok. But then it’s not content I guess, it’s attention. Is TikTok just stealing attention and will watch anything that served to them on the platform they happen to on that day. Makes you wonder how much power personalities actually have :-/

DanielHB 3y ago

Consider that "unprofitable" quote includes the fact that Twitch probably gets AWS compute at cost (Amazon subsidies Twitch server costs)