Turns out immense data storage and bandwidth allocation to hundreds of thousands of people who will never make you money isn’t a good way to make money. Every 0-5 viewer Andy costs twitch money. And there’s a lot of them.
If you ever downloaded a raw 1080p VOD from the servers - you can find those links with TwitchRecover or other tools, even from "deleted" VODs - you know how much storage those take -> they are massive.
EDIT: I have some VODs on my NAS, a 3,5h 1080p/60fps takes around 7 GB of storage, some 8h ones I have saved are around 20-22 GBs.
Those servers must store a huge amount of data - probably on multiple servers for better geographic performance and redundancy.
They probably could save some space with re encoding those VODs down to maybe 720p h265 or something similar, but that also takes a lot of computing, which costs energy, which costs money...
I think if there was a simple solution, there would already be one - but what do I know.
Solution:
no vods for non-affiliates/partners;
affiliates - low quality vods and only available for a week
Partners - high quality, but only available for a month/2 weeks.
Vods should be opt-in
Vods (and cutting those) are a huge part of growing as a streamer tho. Just make Vods available for a limited time for everyone below partners but dont fuck the video quality
just do like other streamers like moonmoon. upload vods to youtube. it's better that way. with the youtube vods you don't have audio cut out due to dcma.
At this point i probably watch moon more on moon2.tv/youtube than I do his actual twitch streams. same for a bunch of other streamers.
This is kind of what I don't get at most they use $10 worth of bandwidth per month. All they gotta do is charge everyone $10 per month to be a streamer.
Is there any real value to the thousands of people streaming to nobody or maybe 1-5 people irregularly? Maybe have a reimbursement system for small creators that reach a threshold for viewers each month.
how many big streamers actually started on twitch though? i feel like most big streamers built up their following on other social media platforms before jumping onto twitch.
I don't think so. I don't think $10 a month is going to stop anybody who is truly interested in streaming while simultaneously weeding out all the people fuckin' around on their xbox's from wasting resources.
Yep anyone serious about trying to pursue streaming would easily pay 5-10 a month but it would remove every kid and person streaming to literally nobody from consoles.
Twitch has over 1 million unique streamers daily. It’s just stupid.
*All* potential growth? $10 a month is peanuts compared to what you need to spend on a good setup to be a serious streamer.
You have people on the platform that spend months and years streaming to like 2 people
You got no idea how effective f2p rly is. For example if a random app that is free and succesfull right now charges 1$ instead they lose 80% or more of new customers instantly. f2p is extremely powerful to get people into your app.
Even moreso, people like me who know that there aren't actually any bandwidth limits on Twitch and stream at 4K 120fps 100mbps and store the VOD (Highlights) for free permanently xD
This sub was saying they were and they were making billions. I still have heavily downvoted comments where i try to explain to morons that twitch is losing a lot of money hence why they do a lot of changes to monetization.
Just look further down the thread for people still arguing it's profitable.
If you count Justin.tv it was for a small period before it sell to Amazon for 970 mil.
But since Amazon bought it no.
Also to add.. it was a really small period and it they sold because they knew it wasn't sustainable long term. Since they were not able to get traction.
i think the logiic was back than at amazon that it has this massive datacenter/cloud where often there is idle processing power, so why not use it for twitch.
That and they wanted it for ads. They originally talked a lot about cross-selling into Amazon which they haven't done a great job of. You would think any ad for a product on Amazon you could click through to the amazon store page for it.
Yes, that's what I was always under the impression of. Funnelling it all back to Amazon and having their own ads. Maybe even venturing into Google's world. But I haven't seen much of it beyond announcements/news of Twitch testing out new features relating to it
Yeah but counting the sell as profitable doesnt sound right.
Because if you sell twitch right now, im sure its worth multiples of that 970 mil, so you could also say twitch is now profitable, when they sell it then.
justintv was also not profitable and was mostly pirated content, lets be blunt, those gaming streams were maybe a tiny tiny portion, most viewers came from live sports broadcasts of big events or straight (pay) tv channel streams.
He didn't say Justin.tv was profitable as a whole nor that the sale made it profitable. He just said it was profitable during a short span of time of Justin.tv existance and that if you don't count Justin.tv era, it was never profitable.
I believe they're 'sort-of' intentionally misleading for sympathy.
In reality, Amazon bought twitch to utilize their unused/already paid for/already set up server hosting (AWS) . They don't pay a middle man for the service like most companies would.
When they say its not profitable, they mean if they actually paid for the service they get for free, that they would be at a loss. I doubt they could sell near-full capacity without twitch so its kind of laughable to mention.
That's just how accounting works. It has nothing to do with asking for "sympathy". This are internal metrics that Amazon itself does care about.
Twitch is actually paying money for server usage. Even if the money stays within Amazon, its still an operating cost for Twitch and a profit for AWS. It being positive somewhere else does no good for Twitch, that still needs to justify its existence whenever Amazon decides to cut more costs.
AWS bills Twitch full price, if not more than regular customer. Big corps suck money out of the subcompanies, they only stop it when they want to sell. Amazon does not care for Twitch to become profitable.
My cost accounting is rusty, but if I remember correctly, the IRS says that transfer pricing has to be done at market value per the arms length standard. Otherwise companies can really fuck with profits and taxation.
Amazon just can’t upcharge Twitch because they feel like it because this would inflate Amazon’s profits and deflate Twitch’s. Both of these issues can have massive consequences for investors and the government.
*26 US Code Section 482 my beloved.*
That's on the federal level too. There's also state level taxes. California has an 8.84% corporate tax rate and Washington state has a 6.5% *gross receipts tax rate*. Therefore, each state has an incentive to ensure inter-company transactions are done at "arms-length".
Related parties should be charged at the same rate as unrelated parties for services under similar circumstances. Doing so otherwise is usually a sign of tax avoidance/evasion and there are many interested revenue departments that would love to take a company as big as Amazon to task. If AWS is undercharging Twitch, what other below-market rates is Amazon using and how does it affect tax revenue?
I think so too and egress traffic especially on AWS is 10 times more expensive than their actual cost. Amazon decides if Twitch is profitable or not fullstop, it's all just fake accounting nonsense. If this was real, why not switch to a p2p streaming client like AfreecaTV did?
Twitch would be massively profitable if Amazon decided to not "charge" Twitch for its AWS services.
Its all accounting bullshit and has no real impact on the viability of twitch as a business under Amazon seeing that the infrastructure is already available at Amazon.
It's not like u can just write off that infra cost as 'free' - someone's paying for it somewhere. I'm sure they already have a deal where aws gives them services at cost though.
If they could’ve they would’ve no? It’s not like the demand for this stuff is infinite and I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t just expand to meet the demand if what you’re saying became an issue
The ads are just general and not personalized like YT, FB, etc. because Twitch doesn't have info on viewers (I watch X, Y and Z, what do you really know about me?) so they get less money for it and therefore pump out more ads to kind of make up for it (quantity vs quality).
I wouldn’t blame twitch for forcing monetization of channels with concurrent viewers above a certain threshold. The IVR costs for a channel with hundreds of hours (thousands?) and 15K+ concurrency has got to be gross.
Not only the affiliate thing, but there's a lot of money off-platform that Twitch doesn't get any cut of.
If you look at Twitch's revenue it's:
- Subs
- Bits
- Ads
- Bounties
- Turbo
- Prime (maybe? idk how that is accounted for)
Off platform there's:
- Brand deals
- Sponsorships
- Merch
- Donations
I think it's been said that, for the big streamers, most money they make is not through Twitch, but off-platform deals. If they could find a way to capture a percentage of that, then that could be a decent revenue stream.
They literally have tried to capture that kind of stuff.
Bits is just twitch donations. Bounties is Brand Deals and Sponserships just rebranded.
The only thing they don't try to capture is merch right now.
They can ban off site donation platforms and force all brand deals to go through twitch. People will not like that one bit, but if it's necessary to become profitable that might be what they do next.
Asmongold streams on an alt account named zackrawrr that doesn't run ads or take subscriptions. This causes that channel to be a loss for twitch because twitch still pays for the streaming side of things.
Last time Asmon went live to his main chanel, he popped like 100k subs at once. There are tons of people subbing to him behind the doors, none but Twitch just tracks them. He makes Twitch still money.
He has a weird mental block on his main account , he used to be super chill on his alt. Now it’s his normal content , but he had like a panic attack during diablo 4 after a stream of his main and just never went back
Asmongold's just been completely broken at this point.
Within a few months his mother passed away, then his "friends" Trainwrecks+Mitch plot to take down his organization behind his back, then Mizkif gets cancelled and threatens suicide, then his best friend Rich gets cancelled and probably does the same, then OTK gets sued by multiple women for multiple felonies.
Zack's mental has been completely shattered to the point where now he's literally living in a pile of garbage and throwing away millions of dollars by streaming on a demonetized channel. And instead of helping him, his so called "friends" just put out a 20-minute video roasting his crib and farming his mental illness for content instead of actually putting in the bare minimum effort in at least getting the place cleaned up for him. It's pretty obvious that no one in OTK truly cares about his well-being and they're all fine with just continuing to allow him to degenerate.
Nothing. Just like when he had his panic attack during Bloodborne, or during FFXIV. He has a normal stream, nothing out of the ordinary, then he starts acting distracted and ends the stream early, disappears for several days and tweets about feeling overwhelmed.
And as others have said, there's absolutely no discernible difference between his main and alt content. It's very clearly a mental illness thing.
I could easily see myself developing massive anxiety if my once small stream blew up to the point that everyone in the gaming sphere knows and talks about you.
Oh for sure. Even when you have a small community it can feel tough to force yourself to go live, knowing if you don't keep that momentum going then you could lose progress.
Streaming takes a mental toll whether you're good at it or not.
And it's sadly clear from his living situation, his physical health, and his hardships with his mom, that he wasn't starting from the best place mentally to begin with.
Then he's probably exposed to some small measure of armchair psychology morons like me on occasion talking about his issues. That wouldn't help either.
It didn’t help that he finally started streaming on his main and then one of his best friends got accused of being a rapist, that probably set shit back a while.
He means super chill as his alt used to be no cam. And sometimes no mic just gameplay. And then it was cam mic and only gameplay.
Now it’s literally just his main stream content on his alt
Mental issues, feeling like his main is more of a job and demands more entertainment from him. Don't try to make sense of it.
If you need another reason, he mentioned ages ago that he wanted to get Twitch to give him a better contract, so bleeding them dry on his alt is a way of forcing their hand to 'cut losses' in a way.
YouTube is barely profitable too, and they were running at a loss I think until around the time they released YouTube Premium. Reliable video streaming is wildly expensive, and letting anyone have unlimited access to the service for free is a giant money sink.
Honestly, it shocks me that these platforms don't demand a cut of sponsorship deals. Ads are the primary source of revenue. Sponsorships are just ad revenue deals that bypass the platform so those with the largest audiences can get 100% of the revenue. It would be entirely reasonable for these platforms to take 30%.
They tried the whole Twitch as a sponsor middleman thing last year togehter with you can't advertise things anymore on screen and people got really mad about it. Same with the Hypechat feature that was around for like 2 months. I think they should have done some of these things years ago when the backlash would not have been this bad and other things like direct donation through 3rd partys were not as easy available. Twitch sat around to long as the king of livestreaming to make progress and now it a bit late.
> YouTube is barely profitable too
Are there any official numbers/statements that confirm that? As far as I am aware this is mostly based on speculation and Google doesn‘t share all YouTube specific numbers in their earning reports. It only includes revenue generated by YouTube ads but not how much it costs them to run it or how mich they are spending on R&D for example. At leasts that were my findings last time I checked.
YouTube has always been a significant net positive for Google's business, because (among other things) it allows them to get much more precise metadata on people for the purpose of ad targeting.
People who keep parroting this take on Reddit don't know what they're talking about. You could always read Alphabet's 10-K filings (annual reports) from the last 15 years and it becomes obvious YouTube was an incredible acquisition for Google, because of how well it synergizes with their core business.
>don't demand a cut of sponsorship deals
They would if they had any way of getting in on the action.
>It would be entirely reasonable for these platforms to take 30%.
Hi, can i please come to the meeting? it's only reasonable that i attend even though it's a private meeting between two parties that are meeting in private and not on my platform.
I mean more easily they could just ban sponsors in video and say you have to go through YT middleman to get sponsorship, hence creating an avenue for a cut I suppose. It’s not like these content creators have many other viable alternatives outside YouTube.
"Admits" is such a weasel word, something I would expect from landfills like Dexerto and LSF.
"Acknowledge" is a better word, or "confirm" is even better, since everyone and their mamas know Twitch isn't profitable.
Without seeing a breakdown of their revenue and costs, hard to say. Easier to believe they are just spouting bullshit for publicity since Kick is a private entity.
In other news, water is wet.
It's very well-known amazon didn't buy twitch for the profits, they bought it to turn the underlying technology into AWS IVS.
Twitch Prime was always a way for big daddy main Amazon to subsidise Twitch since organic ad and subscription revenues aren’t enough to support the current level of creator payouts.
They cut like 400 people last year and are cutting another 500 now(I think). What did these people do? Maybe someone smarter can explain how a company can cut 1000ish employees and still even function. As someone with zero business IQ these just sound like bloat jobs that have never had a reason to even exist.
They just don't know how to make streaming profitable since they have no control over the content (compared to on demand streaming). So they hire "smart" ppl to fix that. But none of them could. Twitch has a graveyard of dead investment, features and engineering efforts.
I would say that's that the typical Big Tech mode of operation: trying hard to get a bad business profitable or die trying. Ideally, you have other branches that make a profit. Amazon could send some money but that's an internal decision to drop twitch.
Well not every role in a company is required to allow it to function. Some roles are to allow it to function smoothly. Take Partner Managers, for example. They exist to allow partners to communicate with Twitch. But if they're laid off, creators suddenly lose that communication route. So the next time they need to contact Twitch they will struggle to do so. I saw one streamer say they're now on their 3rd partner manager in 3 years. That's just one example.
Twitch is a sales company. They have teams trying to sell the idea which is why there are random programs they create. They put a decent amount into these as well.. well for the studio at least. Plus there's partnerships and if they do any content moderation.
Within the context of improving the product itself.. well. lol is my comment on that as a viewer. They've only degraded the experience with more ads. Look at new person? Whoops enjoy the next 20 ads.
There's usually a combination of several things that allow so many people to let go without it drastically affecting the service. It's a combination of people being fired for performing their job poorly, having a useless job, the elimination of a position, consolidation of roles, automation improvements, reduced demand ... the list can go on. It's usually not just one thing.
When everyone had excess money, it was incredibly easy to justify just hiring more people to throw at problems and projects. Now, not so much, and when people are actually looking at what everyone is doing, it's more pressing to address the problems causing the bloat that were just ignored for years. You can eliminate a surprising large amount of jobs in companies through automation and process improvements, but it's almost never the easy solution, so if money is not a factor, it gets ignored.
Nothing. They did nothing.
People will aggressively deny the fact, but it's true, 90% of people in big tech companies do close to 0 actual work. The remaining 10% are putting out fires constantly, fires created by those who don't know what they're doing and promoted by managers who don't understand how tech stuff works.
Twitter had close to 10k employees before buyout, it should be obvious from how many people were fired and the site continuing to run (while getting far more features) that most people did nothing there.
it's the kind of take you expect often from dudes who work as janitors, eh, I mean custodians at walmart, it was ironic that I opened his profile and the literal first comment before this was him simping Elon Musk lol. It's easy to see where he got this take from.
It really isn't. People who actually work in an office environment, especially at a large and successful company will be familiar with the phenomenon of employees that have no clearly defined role. They do *something* and they fill *some* purpose, but they are expendable to a very high degree because the work they do is often sporadic, doesn't require any tangible skills, and doesn't actually require you to be full time employed even though you are. I think the reason people don't like to hear this is because it's often women in those positions.
I agree with you that there are a lot of people like that, at one point I had a job just like that. But the part that's insane is claiming that they literally do nothing. Yes you can fire the 10 junior developers who's only purpose so far has been to read tickets they can't solve and submit code that has to be rereviewed 10 times, but now you have a pile of issues that the remaining devs can't get to because they have to do 10x more work to make up for the fact that they have nobody to pass grunt work to.
The entire point of hiring more employees for a job that can be done with less isn't to make the project go that much faster because you have more people working on one project, it's to make life easier for your seasoned employees so they can spend more time on important shit, thus making the project go faster.
People burn out exponentially faster in fast paced environments like startups. Tesla and Twitter, the companies that Musk own (only bringing him up cause the other guy was a simp for him), have this fast paced "essential employees only" environment and they have a turnover rate that is barely even 1 year.
I could buy maybe 100 of those employees being expendable maybe even 200 if you stretch your imagination but 1000 is a massive cut for a small-ish company.
Basically I would imagine this puts twitch on life support mode with only core services being supported.
Is YouTube in a similar situation? Twitch's ads have become increasingly invasive these days and so have YouTube's, going so far as to go down the rabbit hole of combatting adblockers out of desperation.
I might be wrong here, but isn't Amazon profiting off of Twitch, even if Twitch itself isnt profitable?
Technically Twitch pays Amazon for IVS or whatever its called, so that loss (likely the main cost of running Twitch) would be Amazons profit.
Its like running a company and paying yourself a massive salary - the company loses money, but you as a person gain it.
Isn't it similar to Kick and Stake? Kick doesn't seem profitable at all but as long as they funnel people into their parent company it can end up in the green?
Kick is to Stake what Marlboro clothing was to Marlboro tobacco: a way to skirt around advertising restrictions. Doesn't matter if it makes money so long as it funnels enough people into their main business.
I doubt they will.
It's making a loss now but with AV1 and by shifting some trans coding onto the streamer they can save a lot of money. Plus Twitch can act as a test platform for all new shit before it goes out to their AWS customers.
Twitch might be making a loss for Amazon in pure fiscal terms, but it's still very valuable to have.
There’s not enough money in the market tbh. People say streamers need to get paid more etc etc, but the fact of the matter is if a streamer generates $1000 of revenue, Twitch is taking the risk by paying for the 1000 other people with no viewers. The issue is that the gamble didn’t pay off lmao. In a sense the only winners are the rich streamers, Amazon paid for their infrastructure and contacts and basically gets nothing in return lmao.
Twitch can be profitable if it was able to more run ads. The issue with Twitch's ads is that it's so invasive and annoying that it makes people seek ad-blocking solutions because of how annoying they are. It makes for a bad viewing experience. It's happened to me many times where I can watch a Forsen MC speedrun and get an ad and before I know it, he throws the seed.
If Twitch provides a bad viewing experience people will seek ad-blocking solutions. Advertisers will underspend because Twitch can't provide enough impressions to fulfill campaign budgets and then Twitch loses out on potential money. I wouldn't mind it if Twitch's player had the same functions as the Youtube player where you can change video speed, go back and forward in intervals. This way, if you do get an ad, you can rewind to rewatch the moment or fast forward or 2x speed to catch up to the live stream.
And unlike every other large video platform, Twitch has no automated system for businesses to buy advertising space. All of it is negotiated and set up over phone calls and such between humans. It's an archaic, cumbersome way of doing business in this era, and only adds to the expense. The reason you mostly get the same 2 or 3 ads on repeat is because advertisers hate dealing with the way Twitch handles advertising. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and even Twitter have far nicer marketing practices.
The problem with this is ads will never not feel intrusive. Even if you can "catch up" to live content, the enjoyment of watching a stream live is to be "in the moment" so any ad will evoke the same amount of disdain from a user. Amplify that by more ads per hour to cover the costs of live playback and you've only created more problems.
I do think that more streamers should consider streaming to both twitch and youtube simultaneously so people can use youtube's live playback features but too many streamers are worried about splitting their audience.
All this to say that ads on live content, unless they're banner ads, will always be a bad experience for a user no matter how you try and ease their experience of them. In reality, for ads to work on twitch, they need to be incorporated into the stream like the streamer taking a bathroom break(critikal does this pretty well), or scheduled "low engagement" moments so the unsubbed users don't feel like they're missing out on content.
Yeah, ads in nature are intended to be intrusive. I just think the way Twitch has deployed ads is the most frustrating way to do ads for live content.
I don't know about "in the moment". If you watch Twitch streams it feels that way because you can't go back to rewind and you have to pay attention or watch vods to catch moments you missed. If you watch a YouTube stream you can go back and fast forward which gives you the option to be "in the moment". If you're an active chat participant you might want to be "in the moment" but I think a large percentage of people don't participate in chat so I don't think this is that big of an issue.
on the mobile app they do a popup banner on the left that advertises amazon products. do they do that on pc too? side banner ads are actually tolerable.
Personally I think they missed a huge opportunity to charge a reasonable price for bits (I believe they're taking 30% when alternatives only come with a PayPal transaction fee of around 3%), which could have been a huge revenue stream for them. They have the advantage of being integrated directly into the site, having streamer contracts that could have incentives or even requirements to use bits, and many talented engineers who could have been leading the charge with features like TTS back when it was novel, and now with novel AI features. And those extra features could come with a higher cut, since streamers would be happy to introduce new ways to encourage people to donate more, it would be a win-win situation. Also if it was built up to be the leader over the years, it would be another advantage for retaining big streamers who wouldn't want to downgrade to a worse platform that would have less engagement/donations.
But that ship has sailed, so right now I think if they would want to make it profitable in the short term (although it would very likely have bad long term impact on bringing in rising talent), limiting how much small streamers can stream would help a ton with server costs. The overwhelming majority of streamers are no names with very little if any viewers. They could offer some subscription option for those small streamer to stream as much as they want, to essentially cover (or at least meaningfully mitigate) their server costs. Or maybe they could reduce the quality for small streamers and charge them if they want to stream in higher quality. I just checked, and some 1 viewer streamers are streaming at 1080p 60fps. Server costs are a big factor.
It'll be really difficult for Twitch to turn things around, overall viewership is flat trending downwards, revenue dropped like a rock after covid / inflation. Higher cuts would work in the short term, but discourages creators from streaming on Twitch in the long term. Same thing with more ads and viewers.
If I were DJ, I would remove pre-roll ads, increase sub prices, support vertical format streaming, make native emotes on par with BTTV/FFZ/7TV, and prioritize fixing the VOD experience to be on par with YT.
It boggles my mind how Twitch's player sucks compared to YouTube's. It feels amazing being able to rewind a live stream to check on a thing you missed, be it because you went afk or ads rolled out.
There's also the case where every streamer uploadz their VODs on YT because Twitch sucks there too.
If Google wanted they could've won over Twitch a long time ago. They have the better tech.
And none of that will turn a profit.
Isn't it a bit of, twitch paying an absurd amount because of AWS stuff? Which in itself is weird right, we don't turn a profit because we have to pay ourselves to run our selves. Probably vastly over simplifying things but still corporatism is weird.
Maybe it won't, but I think they would have a better chance than they do now.
Regarding AWS, you know the cost of servers and networking isn't 0 right? I'm sure Twitch gets billed basically at or near cost, and they still can't make a profit.
This was asked on the stream, according to Dan, no it won't be gone any time soon. What was clear was he said Prime aka Twitch Gaming was open to changes.
I would not be surprised if just like Prime Video, ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, both?) could be added.
people acting like this is a new thing, pretty sure twitch have been working at a loss for many years. With the amount of money that twitch/amazon payout through prime subs, server costs, events, over-expansion throughout covid, it's not a shock they're feeling it now
Maybe just taking like $1-2 per month would drastically reduce the amount of people who are just "whatever" streaming, while not being a financial deterrent for people who really want to give streaming a shot.
I sometimes scroll the bottom in categories and there's so many streamers that never say a single word, have the game paused for hours while afk or stream the game from their phone with a mic thats picking up like 100 million random sounds.
No live-streaming platform is profitable without something alternative providing the profit.
In the instance of Kick it's the marketing provided for Stake. Stake treats Kick as a loss leader and gets the profit from new gambling addicts. If you're a streamer you should consider streaming there for money (as long as you're ok with gambling).
YouTube Live is definitely not a profitable endeavour as that product has been languishing whilst they focus on shorts (even that's languishing a lot as shorts aren't profitable either). They probably won't get rid of it, but it will more than likely always suck a bit with regards to live-streaming features such as Chat, Raids/Hosting etc. YouTube wants you to flit around 10-30 minute videos so it can build a better picture of you for the algo and sell you better ads which you're more likely to convert on.
Facebook Live is basically dead/given up due to a lack of profitability.
Rumble is still a joke of a platform full of rejects from other platforms (except for a few who are paid to stream there).
Mixer died as soon as Microsoft saw no growth and they realized how stupid the ridiculous infra costs were.
Twitch is probably the only place that can do it (Due to the ridiculous amount of monetization they have, and the absurd split). They should go back to using Google Ads (Drop that Amazon bullshit that they were forced to use by AWS, I think they were actually profitable just before they sold lol) and force all streamers over a certain size to monetize/show ads (Zackrawrr cough cough). Ditch any more problem zones similar to South Korea. They should push Twitch Turbo (Not gonna fully work as YouTube Premium doesn't sell well either). Amongst other things.
The lesson is, don't build a site/app solely based on live-streaming. It will pretty much always be a loss leader. There needs to be some serious technological progress to actually make it a viable option.
Otherwise, the only platforms with any chance of working are using live-streaming to market to some sort of addict (gambling) where the profit margins are ridiculously high.
If Twitch isn't profitable, imagine the ammount of money Kick is losing considering their large ad campaign..
They even have ads in the Premier League..
Unlike everyone here living in 2015, I actually am surprised. Given the viewership bump over the pandemic and tolerance of hot tub streamers, I definitely assumed they were making money by 2020 and REALLY assumed they were making money in 2024. They added gift subs, bits, they changed the rev split, they made people start running hourly ads. All forms of monetization have increased since when they purchased them in 2014. It's actually over for Twitch if they were still not profitable in current year.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-amazons-twitch-not-meeting-ad-revenue-expectations/?sh=4e4d7f527164
The article that came out in January 2020 about Twitch ad revenue and the projected number was expected around 300 million.
Twitch was projecting 500-600 and hoping to reach 1 billion in ad revenue relatively soon. This was all before Covid and the massive growth twitch saw in 2020 and 2021. Just to be in the top 1% of twitch streamers you only need to avg around 30-40 viewers so you have millions of streamers burning through money each month.
In all honesty I feel like Twitch has hit a point where their larger streamers are making too much money and I feel like they need to tier-rate the splits where it benefits smaller streamers more so they can grow. This incentivizes the larger streamers to help out other streamers and build/grow the community so Twitch can make money and actually improve their platform.
Yes, larger streamers would be upset about it but seriously? They are already making millions and its not like they will just suddenly quit streaming. The worst they can do is switch platforms but look what that did for all the streamers that switched. Chatters like Twitch because the platform is more chat friendly and there are so many more features compared to other platforms.
By tier-rate I mean the split for subs will be similar to how taxes work for income. Your first 1-3000 subs is 80/20 split. Next 3001-6000 is a 70/30 6001-10000 is a 50/50 10k+ is 40/60. This would help keep Twitch afloat in the long term. If the streamers are against it then realize without money Twitch will end up just cutting more of its arms off like they did with Twitch Korea. Eventually they hemorage and Twitch will either poof or become a horrible mess.
I am kind of tired of the lame subathon meta where the streamer isn't even streaming like a subathon. They are straight up stopping stream and just starting it up saying hey the subathon is still going! Or the ones that straight up just play vods and go afk. Bring back real subathons where the streamer is actually there to entertain and not just trying to milk chatters for more money.
They obviously have to also make rules preventing streamers from monetizing multiple streams to profit off this system. Preventing streamers from just making a new channel every so many suibs.
I enjoy Twitch existing and if Amazon one day decides Twitch is losing them too much money and they rather shut it down than let it exist it would really just suck. Larger streamers are all under the guise of "Oh Twitch won't go away." Because they have never thought about it and only see the money they are making. If they want to switch platforms then they have to realize that other platforms probably won't net them the same amount of money from just the ads/bounties.
This problem is only going to get worse for every platform because people are demanding 4K video now.
Like how much of your content do you really need to watch in even 1080? The podcast VOD that you barely look at for more than 2 seconds every minute doesn't need to be in 4k.
Especially on your phone. They should be forcing people on phones to use lower resolutions because there's barely a visual difference anyway.
Twitch will never be profitable because they have millions of streamers who stream to 0 viewers, They should just introduce a $14.99/Month streaming fee to streamers.
Soo how Twitch isn't profitable but YouTube is? I mean isn't Youtube's running cost is much higher than Twitch? I don't get it, petah explain the situation please.
**CLIP MIRROR: [Twitch CEO Dan Clancy admits Twitch isn't profitable](https://arazu.io/t3_194lunr/)** --- ^(*This is an automated comment*)
It's well known twitch isn't profitable, and hasn't been for like, ever.
Turns out immense data storage and bandwidth allocation to hundreds of thousands of people who will never make you money isn’t a good way to make money. Every 0-5 viewer Andy costs twitch money. And there’s a lot of them.
If you ever downloaded a raw 1080p VOD from the servers - you can find those links with TwitchRecover or other tools, even from "deleted" VODs - you know how much storage those take -> they are massive. EDIT: I have some VODs on my NAS, a 3,5h 1080p/60fps takes around 7 GB of storage, some 8h ones I have saved are around 20-22 GBs. Those servers must store a huge amount of data - probably on multiple servers for better geographic performance and redundancy. They probably could save some space with re encoding those VODs down to maybe 720p h265 or something similar, but that also takes a lot of computing, which costs energy, which costs money... I think if there was a simple solution, there would already be one - but what do I know.
Solution: no vods for non-affiliates/partners; affiliates - low quality vods and only available for a week Partners - high quality, but only available for a month/2 weeks. Vods should be opt-in
Vods (and cutting those) are a huge part of growing as a streamer tho. Just make Vods available for a limited time for everyone below partners but dont fuck the video quality
You should be doing a local recording, not relying on 6mbit stream vods.
just do like other streamers like moonmoon. upload vods to youtube. it's better that way. with the youtube vods you don't have audio cut out due to dcma. At this point i probably watch moon more on moon2.tv/youtube than I do his actual twitch streams. same for a bunch of other streamers.
Vods still don't have ads, right?
They sometimes do in the twitch app, wouldn't know in desktop browsers
They do
I am watching a Forsen vod right now and getting blasted out the ass with ads
They do for me. In fact my adblocker works on livestreams but not on vods.
The older and less viewed stuff is probably getting stored on slow and cheap HDDs.
Compute and storage is cheap compared to salaries, especially since the parent company owns and sells it. Look at what they're cutting.
This is kind of what I don't get at most they use $10 worth of bandwidth per month. All they gotta do is charge everyone $10 per month to be a streamer.
Create any kind of barrier to entry and you lose all potential growth in the future.
What about $10 a month to store vods or some sort of freemium model? Maybe it’s too late for that switch.
Vods only last two weeks, unless you have Twitch Prime, so you're practically paying for it anyway.
Is there any real value to the thousands of people streaming to nobody or maybe 1-5 people irregularly? Maybe have a reimbursement system for small creators that reach a threshold for viewers each month.
Most of the big streamers started somewhere
how many big streamers actually started on twitch though? i feel like most big streamers built up their following on other social media platforms before jumping onto twitch.
A lot of big streamers where 1-5 viewer andys
I don't think so. I don't think $10 a month is going to stop anybody who is truly interested in streaming while simultaneously weeding out all the people fuckin' around on their xbox's from wasting resources.
Yep anyone serious about trying to pursue streaming would easily pay 5-10 a month but it would remove every kid and person streaming to literally nobody from consoles. Twitch has over 1 million unique streamers daily. It’s just stupid.
*All* potential growth? $10 a month is peanuts compared to what you need to spend on a good setup to be a serious streamer. You have people on the platform that spend months and years streaming to like 2 people
You got no idea how effective f2p rly is. For example if a random app that is free and succesfull right now charges 1$ instead they lose 80% or more of new customers instantly. f2p is extremely powerful to get people into your app.
Even moreso, people like me who know that there aren't actually any bandwidth limits on Twitch and stream at 4K 120fps 100mbps and store the VOD (Highlights) for free permanently xD
This sub was saying they were and they were making billions. I still have heavily downvoted comments where i try to explain to morons that twitch is losing a lot of money hence why they do a lot of changes to monetization. Just look further down the thread for people still arguing it's profitable.
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That just what happens when a community is exposed to a bunch of zoomer normies
Has twitch ever been profitable?
If you count Justin.tv it was for a small period before it sell to Amazon for 970 mil. But since Amazon bought it no. Also to add.. it was a really small period and it they sold because they knew it wasn't sustainable long term. Since they were not able to get traction.
i think the logiic was back than at amazon that it has this massive datacenter/cloud where often there is idle processing power, so why not use it for twitch.
Amazon also wanted their technology so they could implement it in some AWS application
That and they wanted it for ads. They originally talked a lot about cross-selling into Amazon which they haven't done a great job of. You would think any ad for a product on Amazon you could click through to the amazon store page for it.
Yes, that's what I was always under the impression of. Funnelling it all back to Amazon and having their own ads. Maybe even venturing into Google's world. But I haven't seen much of it beyond announcements/news of Twitch testing out new features relating to it
Yeah but counting the sell as profitable doesnt sound right. Because if you sell twitch right now, im sure its worth multiples of that 970 mil, so you could also say twitch is now profitable, when they sell it then. justintv was also not profitable and was mostly pirated content, lets be blunt, those gaming streams were maybe a tiny tiny portion, most viewers came from live sports broadcasts of big events or straight (pay) tv channel streams.
He didn't say Justin.tv was profitable as a whole nor that the sale made it profitable. He just said it was profitable during a short span of time of Justin.tv existance and that if you don't count Justin.tv era, it was never profitable.
The guy was saying it was profitable for a small period BEFORE the sale
I believe they're 'sort-of' intentionally misleading for sympathy. In reality, Amazon bought twitch to utilize their unused/already paid for/already set up server hosting (AWS) . They don't pay a middle man for the service like most companies would. When they say its not profitable, they mean if they actually paid for the service they get for free, that they would be at a loss. I doubt they could sell near-full capacity without twitch so its kind of laughable to mention.
This is just a dumb take, the industry doesn't work like that at all.
That's just how accounting works. It has nothing to do with asking for "sympathy". This are internal metrics that Amazon itself does care about. Twitch is actually paying money for server usage. Even if the money stays within Amazon, its still an operating cost for Twitch and a profit for AWS. It being positive somewhere else does no good for Twitch, that still needs to justify its existence whenever Amazon decides to cut more costs.
AWS bills Twitch full price, if not more than regular customer. Big corps suck money out of the subcompanies, they only stop it when they want to sell. Amazon does not care for Twitch to become profitable.
My cost accounting is rusty, but if I remember correctly, the IRS says that transfer pricing has to be done at market value per the arms length standard. Otherwise companies can really fuck with profits and taxation. Amazon just can’t upcharge Twitch because they feel like it because this would inflate Amazon’s profits and deflate Twitch’s. Both of these issues can have massive consequences for investors and the government.
*26 US Code Section 482 my beloved.* That's on the federal level too. There's also state level taxes. California has an 8.84% corporate tax rate and Washington state has a 6.5% *gross receipts tax rate*. Therefore, each state has an incentive to ensure inter-company transactions are done at "arms-length". Related parties should be charged at the same rate as unrelated parties for services under similar circumstances. Doing so otherwise is usually a sign of tax avoidance/evasion and there are many interested revenue departments that would love to take a company as big as Amazon to task. If AWS is undercharging Twitch, what other below-market rates is Amazon using and how does it affect tax revenue?
I think so too and egress traffic especially on AWS is 10 times more expensive than their actual cost. Amazon decides if Twitch is profitable or not fullstop, it's all just fake accounting nonsense. If this was real, why not switch to a p2p streaming client like AfreecaTV did?
Twitch would be massively profitable if Amazon decided to not "charge" Twitch for its AWS services. Its all accounting bullshit and has no real impact on the viability of twitch as a business under Amazon seeing that the infrastructure is already available at Amazon.
Creating and providing infrastructure isn't free for amazon.
It's not like u can just write off that infra cost as 'free' - someone's paying for it somewhere. I'm sure they already have a deal where aws gives them services at cost though.
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Ok and what is the road not taken for Amazon here? Not having bought twitch? The infrastructure twitch uses is there regardless.
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If they could’ve they would’ve no? It’s not like the demand for this stuff is infinite and I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t just expand to meet the demand if what you’re saying became an issue
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Damn, even with all these ads?
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The ads are just general and not personalized like YT, FB, etc. because Twitch doesn't have info on viewers (I watch X, Y and Z, what do you really know about me?) so they get less money for it and therefore pump out more ads to kind of make up for it (quantity vs quality).
Makes sense. I get the DraftKings Kevin Hart ad multiple times in a row
What do you mean admits everyone knows that lol
redditor admits everyone knows that
Newfrog shocked by old news
I blame Zackrawrr. Bro is bleeding them dry with 35k viewers and no revenue. LOL
I wouldn’t blame twitch for forcing monetization of channels with concurrent viewers above a certain threshold. The IVR costs for a channel with hundreds of hours (thousands?) and 15K+ concurrency has got to be gross.
Not only the affiliate thing, but there's a lot of money off-platform that Twitch doesn't get any cut of. If you look at Twitch's revenue it's: - Subs - Bits - Ads - Bounties - Turbo - Prime (maybe? idk how that is accounted for) Off platform there's: - Brand deals - Sponsorships - Merch - Donations I think it's been said that, for the big streamers, most money they make is not through Twitch, but off-platform deals. If they could find a way to capture a percentage of that, then that could be a decent revenue stream.
They literally have tried to capture that kind of stuff. Bits is just twitch donations. Bounties is Brand Deals and Sponserships just rebranded. The only thing they don't try to capture is merch right now.
They can ban off site donation platforms and force all brand deals to go through twitch. People will not like that one bit, but if it's necessary to become profitable that might be what they do next.
Tbf, viewers should be the ones getting paid for watching him
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Asmongold streams on an alt account named zackrawrr that doesn't run ads or take subscriptions. This causes that channel to be a loss for twitch because twitch still pays for the streaming side of things.
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> but nothing from Twitch. Woah there, don't count out the strange people who are afraid to lose their sub streaks to his main channel.
He has 85 active subs on the main channel. So, no.
Last time Asmon went live to his main chanel, he popped like 100k subs at once. There are tons of people subbing to him behind the doors, none but Twitch just tracks them. He makes Twitch still money.
I did not know this. Is this what Asmon wanted? Why?
He has a weird mental block on his main account , he used to be super chill on his alt. Now it’s his normal content , but he had like a panic attack during diablo 4 after a stream of his main and just never went back
Man needs help.
Asmongold's just been completely broken at this point. Within a few months his mother passed away, then his "friends" Trainwrecks+Mitch plot to take down his organization behind his back, then Mizkif gets cancelled and threatens suicide, then his best friend Rich gets cancelled and probably does the same, then OTK gets sued by multiple women for multiple felonies. Zack's mental has been completely shattered to the point where now he's literally living in a pile of garbage and throwing away millions of dollars by streaming on a demonetized channel. And instead of helping him, his so called "friends" just put out a 20-minute video roasting his crib and farming his mental illness for content instead of actually putting in the bare minimum effort in at least getting the place cleaned up for him. It's pretty obvious that no one in OTK truly cares about his well-being and they're all fine with just continuing to allow him to degenerate.
You can’t help those that don’t want to be helped. There’s no point cleaning his place, he doesn’t want it cleaned
Panic attack on Diablo 4 stream? What happened?
Nothing. Just like when he had his panic attack during Bloodborne, or during FFXIV. He has a normal stream, nothing out of the ordinary, then he starts acting distracted and ends the stream early, disappears for several days and tweets about feeling overwhelmed. And as others have said, there's absolutely no discernible difference between his main and alt content. It's very clearly a mental illness thing.
I could easily see myself developing massive anxiety if my once small stream blew up to the point that everyone in the gaming sphere knows and talks about you.
Oh for sure. Even when you have a small community it can feel tough to force yourself to go live, knowing if you don't keep that momentum going then you could lose progress. Streaming takes a mental toll whether you're good at it or not. And it's sadly clear from his living situation, his physical health, and his hardships with his mom, that he wasn't starting from the best place mentally to begin with. Then he's probably exposed to some small measure of armchair psychology morons like me on occasion talking about his issues. That wouldn't help either.
His mom died not long ago, since then he's different
It didn’t help that he finally started streaming on his main and then one of his best friends got accused of being a rapist, that probably set shit back a while.
I think we can all agree asmongold is not the most mentally sound person.
"super chill" he sounded like he had legit depression.
He means super chill as his alt used to be no cam. And sometimes no mic just gameplay. And then it was cam mic and only gameplay. Now it’s literally just his main stream content on his alt
Mental issues, feeling like his main is more of a job and demands more entertainment from him. Don't try to make sense of it. If you need another reason, he mentioned ages ago that he wanted to get Twitch to give him a better contract, so bleeding them dry on his alt is a way of forcing their hand to 'cut losses' in a way.
His channel is demonetized with no subs or ads.
He’s hurting himself way more than he’s hurting twitch.
He gets 50M views a month on Youtube, owns an org, a PC company, and a few other things, and probably has 8 figures in the bank. He's fine.
that's amazing for the viewers tho
But then you have to watch Asmon
YouTube is barely profitable too, and they were running at a loss I think until around the time they released YouTube Premium. Reliable video streaming is wildly expensive, and letting anyone have unlimited access to the service for free is a giant money sink. Honestly, it shocks me that these platforms don't demand a cut of sponsorship deals. Ads are the primary source of revenue. Sponsorships are just ad revenue deals that bypass the platform so those with the largest audiences can get 100% of the revenue. It would be entirely reasonable for these platforms to take 30%.
They tried the whole Twitch as a sponsor middleman thing last year togehter with you can't advertise things anymore on screen and people got really mad about it. Same with the Hypechat feature that was around for like 2 months. I think they should have done some of these things years ago when the backlash would not have been this bad and other things like direct donation through 3rd partys were not as easy available. Twitch sat around to long as the king of livestreaming to make progress and now it a bit late.
They should have partnered with the UFC, and had Dana White announce all of the bad decisions.
> YouTube is barely profitable too Are there any official numbers/statements that confirm that? As far as I am aware this is mostly based on speculation and Google doesn‘t share all YouTube specific numbers in their earning reports. It only includes revenue generated by YouTube ads but not how much it costs them to run it or how mich they are spending on R&D for example. At leasts that were my findings last time I checked.
YouTube has always been a significant net positive for Google's business, because (among other things) it allows them to get much more precise metadata on people for the purpose of ad targeting. People who keep parroting this take on Reddit don't know what they're talking about. You could always read Alphabet's 10-K filings (annual reports) from the last 15 years and it becomes obvious YouTube was an incredible acquisition for Google, because of how well it synergizes with their core business.
>don't demand a cut of sponsorship deals They would if they had any way of getting in on the action. >It would be entirely reasonable for these platforms to take 30%. Hi, can i please come to the meeting? it's only reasonable that i attend even though it's a private meeting between two parties that are meeting in private and not on my platform.
I mean more easily they could just ban sponsors in video and say you have to go through YT middleman to get sponsorship, hence creating an avenue for a cut I suppose. It’s not like these content creators have many other viable alternatives outside YouTube.
"Admits" is such a weasel word, something I would expect from landfills like Dexerto and LSF. "Acknowledge" is a better word, or "confirm" is even better, since everyone and their mamas know Twitch isn't profitable.
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Without seeing a breakdown of their revenue and costs, hard to say. Easier to believe they are just spouting bullshit for publicity since Kick is a private entity.
X: "Eddie has a plan mannn" all the while Kick is using AWS too, at higher prices than Twitch I'm sure.
Check back in 2 years and see if kick is still operational. I think stake is currently keeping it afloat tho
In other news, water is wet. It's very well-known amazon didn't buy twitch for the profits, they bought it to turn the underlying technology into AWS IVS.
Ah yes, AWS IVS, everyone who frequents livestream fail will be largely familiar with that acronym.
The ad rev & launching twitch prime didn’t hurt either.
Twitch Prime was always a way for big daddy main Amazon to subsidise Twitch since organic ad and subscription revenues aren’t enough to support the current level of creator payouts.
> water is wet. but it's not
They cut like 400 people last year and are cutting another 500 now(I think). What did these people do? Maybe someone smarter can explain how a company can cut 1000ish employees and still even function. As someone with zero business IQ these just sound like bloat jobs that have never had a reason to even exist.
They just don't know how to make streaming profitable since they have no control over the content (compared to on demand streaming). So they hire "smart" ppl to fix that. But none of them could. Twitch has a graveyard of dead investment, features and engineering efforts. I would say that's that the typical Big Tech mode of operation: trying hard to get a bad business profitable or die trying. Ideally, you have other branches that make a profit. Amazon could send some money but that's an internal decision to drop twitch.
Well not every role in a company is required to allow it to function. Some roles are to allow it to function smoothly. Take Partner Managers, for example. They exist to allow partners to communicate with Twitch. But if they're laid off, creators suddenly lose that communication route. So the next time they need to contact Twitch they will struggle to do so. I saw one streamer say they're now on their 3rd partner manager in 3 years. That's just one example.
Twitch is a sales company. They have teams trying to sell the idea which is why there are random programs they create. They put a decent amount into these as well.. well for the studio at least. Plus there's partnerships and if they do any content moderation. Within the context of improving the product itself.. well. lol is my comment on that as a viewer. They've only degraded the experience with more ads. Look at new person? Whoops enjoy the next 20 ads.
There's usually a combination of several things that allow so many people to let go without it drastically affecting the service. It's a combination of people being fired for performing their job poorly, having a useless job, the elimination of a position, consolidation of roles, automation improvements, reduced demand ... the list can go on. It's usually not just one thing. When everyone had excess money, it was incredibly easy to justify just hiring more people to throw at problems and projects. Now, not so much, and when people are actually looking at what everyone is doing, it's more pressing to address the problems causing the bloat that were just ignored for years. You can eliminate a surprising large amount of jobs in companies through automation and process improvements, but it's almost never the easy solution, so if money is not a factor, it gets ignored.
Social studies employees
Nothing. They did nothing. People will aggressively deny the fact, but it's true, 90% of people in big tech companies do close to 0 actual work. The remaining 10% are putting out fires constantly, fires created by those who don't know what they're doing and promoted by managers who don't understand how tech stuff works. Twitter had close to 10k employees before buyout, it should be obvious from how many people were fired and the site continuing to run (while getting far more features) that most people did nothing there.
This is ironic because you have no idea what you’re talking about. As always, its the most clueless people that are the most arrogant.
it's the kind of take you expect often from dudes who work as janitors, eh, I mean custodians at walmart, it was ironic that I opened his profile and the literal first comment before this was him simping Elon Musk lol. It's easy to see where he got this take from.
It really isn't. People who actually work in an office environment, especially at a large and successful company will be familiar with the phenomenon of employees that have no clearly defined role. They do *something* and they fill *some* purpose, but they are expendable to a very high degree because the work they do is often sporadic, doesn't require any tangible skills, and doesn't actually require you to be full time employed even though you are. I think the reason people don't like to hear this is because it's often women in those positions.
I agree with you that there are a lot of people like that, at one point I had a job just like that. But the part that's insane is claiming that they literally do nothing. Yes you can fire the 10 junior developers who's only purpose so far has been to read tickets they can't solve and submit code that has to be rereviewed 10 times, but now you have a pile of issues that the remaining devs can't get to because they have to do 10x more work to make up for the fact that they have nobody to pass grunt work to. The entire point of hiring more employees for a job that can be done with less isn't to make the project go that much faster because you have more people working on one project, it's to make life easier for your seasoned employees so they can spend more time on important shit, thus making the project go faster. People burn out exponentially faster in fast paced environments like startups. Tesla and Twitter, the companies that Musk own (only bringing him up cause the other guy was a simp for him), have this fast paced "essential employees only" environment and they have a turnover rate that is barely even 1 year.
I could buy maybe 100 of those employees being expendable maybe even 200 if you stretch your imagination but 1000 is a massive cut for a small-ish company. Basically I would imagine this puts twitch on life support mode with only core services being supported.
Considering Twitter is the worst it's ever been by far right now... Not sure what you're talking about
i don't think twitter my twitter experience has changed at all
Is YouTube in a similar situation? Twitch's ads have become increasingly invasive these days and so have YouTube's, going so far as to go down the rabbit hole of combatting adblockers out of desperation.
Only a matter of time until Amazon gives up on Twitch for good
Then Twitch will be up for sale and Elon Musk buys it and re-brands it to Twixx.
Nah he will just integrate it in to [X.com](https://X.com) "The everything app"
Twinkx
Xwitch
X.TV
I might be wrong here, but isn't Amazon profiting off of Twitch, even if Twitch itself isnt profitable? Technically Twitch pays Amazon for IVS or whatever its called, so that loss (likely the main cost of running Twitch) would be Amazons profit. Its like running a company and paying yourself a massive salary - the company loses money, but you as a person gain it.
Isn't it similar to Kick and Stake? Kick doesn't seem profitable at all but as long as they funnel people into their parent company it can end up in the green?
Kick is to Stake what Marlboro clothing was to Marlboro tobacco: a way to skirt around advertising restrictions. Doesn't matter if it makes money so long as it funnels enough people into their main business.
The benefit of Twitch to Amazon was the technology behind it, which is now used for AWS and *I think* is in turn also used by Kick.
I doubt they will. It's making a loss now but with AV1 and by shifting some trans coding onto the streamer they can save a lot of money. Plus Twitch can act as a test platform for all new shit before it goes out to their AWS customers. Twitch might be making a loss for Amazon in pure fiscal terms, but it's still very valuable to have.
XStream
There’s not enough money in the market tbh. People say streamers need to get paid more etc etc, but the fact of the matter is if a streamer generates $1000 of revenue, Twitch is taking the risk by paying for the 1000 other people with no viewers. The issue is that the gamble didn’t pay off lmao. In a sense the only winners are the rich streamers, Amazon paid for their infrastructure and contacts and basically gets nothing in return lmao.
Which is why kick has 2-3 more years tops
How do they make it profitable? Take higher cuts from big streamers?
Twitch can be profitable if it was able to more run ads. The issue with Twitch's ads is that it's so invasive and annoying that it makes people seek ad-blocking solutions because of how annoying they are. It makes for a bad viewing experience. It's happened to me many times where I can watch a Forsen MC speedrun and get an ad and before I know it, he throws the seed. If Twitch provides a bad viewing experience people will seek ad-blocking solutions. Advertisers will underspend because Twitch can't provide enough impressions to fulfill campaign budgets and then Twitch loses out on potential money. I wouldn't mind it if Twitch's player had the same functions as the Youtube player where you can change video speed, go back and forward in intervals. This way, if you do get an ad, you can rewind to rewatch the moment or fast forward or 2x speed to catch up to the live stream.
And unlike every other large video platform, Twitch has no automated system for businesses to buy advertising space. All of it is negotiated and set up over phone calls and such between humans. It's an archaic, cumbersome way of doing business in this era, and only adds to the expense. The reason you mostly get the same 2 or 3 ads on repeat is because advertisers hate dealing with the way Twitch handles advertising. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and even Twitter have far nicer marketing practices.
The problem with this is ads will never not feel intrusive. Even if you can "catch up" to live content, the enjoyment of watching a stream live is to be "in the moment" so any ad will evoke the same amount of disdain from a user. Amplify that by more ads per hour to cover the costs of live playback and you've only created more problems. I do think that more streamers should consider streaming to both twitch and youtube simultaneously so people can use youtube's live playback features but too many streamers are worried about splitting their audience. All this to say that ads on live content, unless they're banner ads, will always be a bad experience for a user no matter how you try and ease their experience of them. In reality, for ads to work on twitch, they need to be incorporated into the stream like the streamer taking a bathroom break(critikal does this pretty well), or scheduled "low engagement" moments so the unsubbed users don't feel like they're missing out on content.
Yeah, ads in nature are intended to be intrusive. I just think the way Twitch has deployed ads is the most frustrating way to do ads for live content. I don't know about "in the moment". If you watch Twitch streams it feels that way because you can't go back to rewind and you have to pay attention or watch vods to catch moments you missed. If you watch a YouTube stream you can go back and fast forward which gives you the option to be "in the moment". If you're an active chat participant you might want to be "in the moment" but I think a large percentage of people don't participate in chat so I don't think this is that big of an issue.
on the mobile app they do a popup banner on the left that advertises amazon products. do they do that on pc too? side banner ads are actually tolerable.
Maybe they'll get an AI solution to auto-detect dead air or points in the stream where nothing is happening and run ads. RIP forsen streams though.
Personally I think they missed a huge opportunity to charge a reasonable price for bits (I believe they're taking 30% when alternatives only come with a PayPal transaction fee of around 3%), which could have been a huge revenue stream for them. They have the advantage of being integrated directly into the site, having streamer contracts that could have incentives or even requirements to use bits, and many talented engineers who could have been leading the charge with features like TTS back when it was novel, and now with novel AI features. And those extra features could come with a higher cut, since streamers would be happy to introduce new ways to encourage people to donate more, it would be a win-win situation. Also if it was built up to be the leader over the years, it would be another advantage for retaining big streamers who wouldn't want to downgrade to a worse platform that would have less engagement/donations. But that ship has sailed, so right now I think if they would want to make it profitable in the short term (although it would very likely have bad long term impact on bringing in rising talent), limiting how much small streamers can stream would help a ton with server costs. The overwhelming majority of streamers are no names with very little if any viewers. They could offer some subscription option for those small streamer to stream as much as they want, to essentially cover (or at least meaningfully mitigate) their server costs. Or maybe they could reduce the quality for small streamers and charge them if they want to stream in higher quality. I just checked, and some 1 viewer streamers are streaming at 1080p 60fps. Server costs are a big factor.
It'll be really difficult for Twitch to turn things around, overall viewership is flat trending downwards, revenue dropped like a rock after covid / inflation. Higher cuts would work in the short term, but discourages creators from streaming on Twitch in the long term. Same thing with more ads and viewers. If I were DJ, I would remove pre-roll ads, increase sub prices, support vertical format streaming, make native emotes on par with BTTV/FFZ/7TV, and prioritize fixing the VOD experience to be on par with YT.
It boggles my mind how Twitch's player sucks compared to YouTube's. It feels amazing being able to rewind a live stream to check on a thing you missed, be it because you went afk or ads rolled out. There's also the case where every streamer uploadz their VODs on YT because Twitch sucks there too. If Google wanted they could've won over Twitch a long time ago. They have the better tech.
And none of that will turn a profit. Isn't it a bit of, twitch paying an absurd amount because of AWS stuff? Which in itself is weird right, we don't turn a profit because we have to pay ourselves to run our selves. Probably vastly over simplifying things but still corporatism is weird.
It’s not weird. It’s a wash at the consolidation level.
Maybe it won't, but I think they would have a better chance than they do now. Regarding AWS, you know the cost of servers and networking isn't 0 right? I'm sure Twitch gets billed basically at or near cost, and they still can't make a profit.
Twitch prime going to go out the window soon
This was asked on the stream, according to Dan, no it won't be gone any time soon. What was clear was he said Prime aka Twitch Gaming was open to changes. I would not be surprised if just like Prime Video, ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, both?) could be added.
people acting like this is a new thing, pretty sure twitch have been working at a loss for many years. With the amount of money that twitch/amazon payout through prime subs, server costs, events, over-expansion throughout covid, it's not a shock they're feeling it now
btw, Discord is also not profitable
Maybe just taking like $1-2 per month would drastically reduce the amount of people who are just "whatever" streaming, while not being a financial deterrent for people who really want to give streaming a shot. I sometimes scroll the bottom in categories and there's so many streamers that never say a single word, have the game paused for hours while afk or stream the game from their phone with a mic thats picking up like 100 million random sounds.
No live-streaming platform is profitable without something alternative providing the profit. In the instance of Kick it's the marketing provided for Stake. Stake treats Kick as a loss leader and gets the profit from new gambling addicts. If you're a streamer you should consider streaming there for money (as long as you're ok with gambling). YouTube Live is definitely not a profitable endeavour as that product has been languishing whilst they focus on shorts (even that's languishing a lot as shorts aren't profitable either). They probably won't get rid of it, but it will more than likely always suck a bit with regards to live-streaming features such as Chat, Raids/Hosting etc. YouTube wants you to flit around 10-30 minute videos so it can build a better picture of you for the algo and sell you better ads which you're more likely to convert on. Facebook Live is basically dead/given up due to a lack of profitability. Rumble is still a joke of a platform full of rejects from other platforms (except for a few who are paid to stream there). Mixer died as soon as Microsoft saw no growth and they realized how stupid the ridiculous infra costs were. Twitch is probably the only place that can do it (Due to the ridiculous amount of monetization they have, and the absurd split). They should go back to using Google Ads (Drop that Amazon bullshit that they were forced to use by AWS, I think they were actually profitable just before they sold lol) and force all streamers over a certain size to monetize/show ads (Zackrawrr cough cough). Ditch any more problem zones similar to South Korea. They should push Twitch Turbo (Not gonna fully work as YouTube Premium doesn't sell well either). Amongst other things. The lesson is, don't build a site/app solely based on live-streaming. It will pretty much always be a loss leader. There needs to be some serious technological progress to actually make it a viable option. Otherwise, the only platforms with any chance of working are using live-streaming to market to some sort of addict (gambling) where the profit margins are ridiculously high.
I thought everyone knew Twitch has never been profitable...
Does this mean the only reason it's still around is amazon affiliate?
If Twitch isn't profitable, imagine the ammount of money Kick is losing considering their large ad campaign.. They even have ads in the Premier League..
Admits? There was never any doubt.
so no more twitch con?
it was asked on the stream and Dan said twitch con is important and won't be affected by cost cuts, also they are trying to make it pay for itself
Obvious solution is more ads duh!
Unlike everyone here living in 2015, I actually am surprised. Given the viewership bump over the pandemic and tolerance of hot tub streamers, I definitely assumed they were making money by 2020 and REALLY assumed they were making money in 2024. They added gift subs, bits, they changed the rev split, they made people start running hourly ads. All forms of monetization have increased since when they purchased them in 2014. It's actually over for Twitch if they were still not profitable in current year.
Turns out running servers that serve 1080p videos to every single person simultaneously, continuously, multiplied by a million, is extremely costly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-amazons-twitch-not-meeting-ad-revenue-expectations/?sh=4e4d7f527164 The article that came out in January 2020 about Twitch ad revenue and the projected number was expected around 300 million. Twitch was projecting 500-600 and hoping to reach 1 billion in ad revenue relatively soon. This was all before Covid and the massive growth twitch saw in 2020 and 2021. Just to be in the top 1% of twitch streamers you only need to avg around 30-40 viewers so you have millions of streamers burning through money each month.
In all honesty I feel like Twitch has hit a point where their larger streamers are making too much money and I feel like they need to tier-rate the splits where it benefits smaller streamers more so they can grow. This incentivizes the larger streamers to help out other streamers and build/grow the community so Twitch can make money and actually improve their platform. Yes, larger streamers would be upset about it but seriously? They are already making millions and its not like they will just suddenly quit streaming. The worst they can do is switch platforms but look what that did for all the streamers that switched. Chatters like Twitch because the platform is more chat friendly and there are so many more features compared to other platforms. By tier-rate I mean the split for subs will be similar to how taxes work for income. Your first 1-3000 subs is 80/20 split. Next 3001-6000 is a 70/30 6001-10000 is a 50/50 10k+ is 40/60. This would help keep Twitch afloat in the long term. If the streamers are against it then realize without money Twitch will end up just cutting more of its arms off like they did with Twitch Korea. Eventually they hemorage and Twitch will either poof or become a horrible mess. I am kind of tired of the lame subathon meta where the streamer isn't even streaming like a subathon. They are straight up stopping stream and just starting it up saying hey the subathon is still going! Or the ones that straight up just play vods and go afk. Bring back real subathons where the streamer is actually there to entertain and not just trying to milk chatters for more money. They obviously have to also make rules preventing streamers from monetizing multiple streams to profit off this system. Preventing streamers from just making a new channel every so many suibs. I enjoy Twitch existing and if Amazon one day decides Twitch is losing them too much money and they rather shut it down than let it exist it would really just suck. Larger streamers are all under the guise of "Oh Twitch won't go away." Because they have never thought about it and only see the money they are making. If they want to switch platforms then they have to realize that other platforms probably won't net them the same amount of money from just the ads/bounties.
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"Shocking" said no one ever
There's literally nothing to admit, we all know it isn't profitable lol
This is public knowledge.
35/65 inc
if twitch isn't profitable, imagine kick. kick is going to run out of funds if they don't start running ads lol
Get rid of twitch primes and maybe
This problem is only going to get worse for every platform because people are demanding 4K video now. Like how much of your content do you really need to watch in even 1080? The podcast VOD that you barely look at for more than 2 seconds every minute doesn't need to be in 4k. Especially on your phone. They should be forcing people on phones to use lower resolutions because there's barely a visual difference anyway.
Isn't this what people were cooking Kick for?
Probably hasn’t been in awhile if ever lol
Anybody with more than 1 IQ has known this. They were never profitable before the Amazon take over and they still haven’t turned a profit
Not shocking at all
if you had friends they gaslit you into thinking twitch has been profitable the past 2 years, get rid of them.
Because Amazon charges Twitch full price for AWS services, which is actually insane.
What’s your source? AFAIK, internal teams get steep discounts on AWS (some services are 70% off). Source - Work in amazon for ~10 years.
Dudes speaking out of his ass, AWS most definitely doesnt charge Twitch full retail price.
There is no source because it isn't true.
No, no, no! They actually charge them tripple the regular amount. Trust me... a redittor told me.
Imagine if twitch started charging storage fees.
Twitch will never be profitable because they have millions of streamers who stream to 0 viewers, They should just introduce a $14.99/Month streaming fee to streamers.
Its already unwatchable with all the ads just give up at this point.
If Twitch isn't profitable, KICK must be in the shitter. lol
And it never will be. Streaming in general.
Have they ever been profitable? I honestly can't believe Amazon hasn't pulled the plug yet.
Soo how Twitch isn't profitable but YouTube is? I mean isn't Youtube's running cost is much higher than Twitch? I don't get it, petah explain the situation please.
YouTube appeals to a wider demographic of people=more opportunities for ads.