(Bloomberg) – Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming site Twitch is poised to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, according to people familiar with the plans, the latest in a series of job reductions there.

The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months. A Twitch spokesperson declined to comment.

Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive,” according to a blog post he wrote.

Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. 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.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit.

“It’s always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,’’ a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. “We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.”

The former employees all declined to comment.

Since he took the position in March 2023, Clancy has been on a cross-country charm offensive to mend relations with the gaming celebrities who make a living streaming on Twitch. Many of them chafed at Twitch’s original approach to ads, which the company reworked after criticism. Streamers have praised Clancy’s desire to listen to their concerns after years of complaints that the service was out of touch with its users.

The new chief has struggled to stem losses, however. Twitch undertook two rounds of layoffs last year, cutting over 400 positions, part of wider job reductions at Amazon.

The online retail giant initiated its biggest-ever corporate job cuts in 2022, which it expanded to 27,000 positions across the company. It continued in October with a new round of cuts to its music division, which encompasses the company’s audio streaming platform and digital storefront for songs.

  • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Google seems complicit in this since they make nearly no attempt to move in on Twitch despite having massive resources

    YouTube has thrown massive exclusive contracts at some streamers and successfully gotten them to convert

    Issue is these sites depend on the network effect so it’s pretty hard to break in like with Google+ attempt

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Most of YouTube shorts is just TikTok reposts, and YouTube live is mostly already popular YouTubers livestreaming. A different demographic than twitch. It will be more popular than twitch in the long run, because twitch is run by fools.

    • Justice
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      10 months ago

      It could be incompetence or just me being too critical from the outside, but what you’ve said is true. However, I’d say YouTube never tried hard enough. I think if they asked viewers, customers, whatever we are (ad watchers 👀) for “tips” to make YouTube Live more viable, and they specifically targeted watchers of TikTok lives and Twitch (being the most popular already) they’d hear (from me anyway): emotes, emotes, emotes. Separate client/app. Promote live content more front snd center. The way they do their “Shorts” TikTok ripoff content now. That got popular despite original pushback from people because they just kinda held our mouths open and let the shit flow in. They never did that with live. I know some of this has been addressed fully or half assedly, whichever, but still. YouTube has kinda given up now. And they never even tried that hard. They tried harder with YouTube Music (also a bit of a flop considering it was around back when Spotify was coming up) than they ever did with Live. It has its own separate app which is a necessity, it’s marketed as an additional feature with YouTube premium, that sort of thing.