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It's assinine that these companies keep investing in ideas that A/ Rely on video and B/ Rely on the majority of their content creators contributing their content for free.

The only thing that Twitch was ever going to do was drive traffic elsewhere. Hence why Amazon bought them. But they failed to get good at being Twitch. It still sucks in terms of performance and there's no subsidiary platform for Twitch clips. Also didn't they chase off most of their adult content creators?

So they're basically trying to be profitable off of traditional advertising? Ha!

Profitable? I thought it was a loss leader to get people into Amazon's gaming ecosystem.

I'd care if it was profitable when it was on its own, but now that it's part of Amazon, I assumed it was just part of a Prime sub.

Like I care. Amazon bought it, they have a monopoly, hey maybe these consumer facing startups would be more profitable if all the money wasnt already distributed so unevenly?

It's critical that Twitch is here not just today, not just tomorrow, but 50 years from now, 100 years from now. Our job is to run Twitch in a manner that can ensure its prosperity [...]

I know the guy is peddling bullshit to justify the layoffs, but 50 years from now, really? Publicly traded companies / stakeholders rarely care about 5 years from now...

This isn't surprising in the least. They've been pushing more and more ads recently; trying to get streamers to run them more often. I hate ads, so I have always opted for a short pre-roll so that when its done, viewers won't have to worry about ads anymore. But I think Twitch will eventually force streamers to run ads every half hour, no matter how many people they scare off.

This is essentially admitting that the cheap money dried up as interest rates returned to normal and now they're in trouble.

This is basically the story of the last year in tech and while the fed has indicated rates aren't going to rise further and may start to decline in 2024, we're unlikely to return to the ultra low rate environment that's existed for the past 15 years.

I fully expect we'll hear a lot more stories like this as Silicon Valley companies are forced to actually operate as profitable businesses.

Twitch was never enough revenue for its "employees" (i.e. streamers, the actual content generators), so streamers have been diversifying their brands for years, and slowly Twitch and Youtube are losing their status as the interaction points for those creators. So many of the successful streamers operate Patreons or other off-site ways to interact with their content, and in the meantime YT and Twitch just serve as the repos for the bulk video content, which is expensive to host.

I sub to a few Patreons for video creators, so I get gDrive links to the raw videos, which I then store on my private Jellyfin server, completely bypassing YT or Twitch. I'm not saying that's necessarily the norm, but in the past it wasn't even an option; I would have had to go to the hosting site to watch it.

So little of our modern internet is realistically profitable in the long term. Same with other big segments of tech.

They exist do to this notion of “ if we just get the user base and replace this old thing with our new thing, we can then monetize later.” They think they are successful because their new services is more innovative or better than existing services, some times they are, but people don’t use them because of that. People use these services because they are cheap, free, or convenient.

If you try and charge for the real cost of operations, or monetize in some other way (basically all options here make it less convenient or hurt UX), people wouldn’t use them. Ether they have to keep operating at a loss or lose their dominant market position and survive on captive audiences.

Modern tech is an oroborous of investors subsidizing the new guy to dethrone the old guy. But this only works so long as there is investor cash available to subsidize all this stuff, and that’s starting to dry up because of shifts in the world market. Labor shortages forcing industry to substitute capital for labor, meaning they’re competing for capital with tech, for example.

The biggest for profit platforms are getting worse and more hostile to users/content-creators in an attempt to turn a profit, nothing new there, but now there is way less money to fund cheap convenient new start ups to replace them as they die off. If I had to wager a guess, much more basic, less feature rich, and cheaper to operate alternatives are going to start eating the lunch of these platforms.

Some of it maybe new start ups that just don’t have the funding to develop their platforms beyond the bare minimum people will accept, some might be community organized projects that are run by volunteers and donations, see Wikipedia. Maybe decentralized interoperable systems where the capital and labor can be distributed over a larger number of willing parties.

Ether way we’re going to see a lot of blood in the water over the next few years.

Translation: "We never had an actual business plan." Which is pretty much every Silicon Valley corp for the last 25 years.

The Silicon Valley funding model. Tesla is going to be feeling the squeeze too.

Everyone is expecting way too much profit off of this shit and spends on it trying to get it there when it was never going to be a cash cow,