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.
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.
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…
100 years from now? This guy is delusional.
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.
Lol, so Google foots the hosting bill either on YT or GDrive? That is hilarious.
Yes, though I suspect that given the size of the raw videos, the creators I sub to probably all pay for additional gDrive space. 15GB is the free limit afaik, and some of the videos are 5GB+ each, and there are tens of videos.
Consider using yt-dlp. You can download any video from youtube in any quality available.
I back them on Patreon because I want to support them monetarily, not because I want higher video quality.
My apologies, I misread your previous comment. Please disregard.
No worries!
With a Business account, GDrive is $20/month per 5TB… which they just recently updated from $20/month per 1000TB (it used to be $15/month per unlimited TB, then people abused it to store over 2000TB and stuff like that).
Sounds like they know most people will never use very much, so they are counting on the lightweight users to subsidize the heavy users.
I blame LTT for giving people ideas: https://youtu.be/y2F0wjoKEhg
He got a few million views on the video, everyone got capped.
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.
The sad thing is that if all these investors, finance bros, and tech bros actually paid their taxes and paid their employees decent salaries, so that income and wealth inequality was lower and more people had more money than barely enough to live on… people would have spare money that they might actually spend on things like better services that have fees attached. People use the free, cheap, convenient options because they don’t have the time or money to spend on the higher quality ones, since the vast majority of internet services are luxuries, not essentials. No one’s going to pay for Twitch if they’re spending all their money on ridiculous things like food and rent. The best way to make the internet profitable is, in fact, to redistribute wealth away from the investors, finance bros, and tech bros who are so desperate for the internet to be profitable.
See, the problem is that if they did that, then there would be far less incentive to work at the soul sapping companies they own.
After all, who would choose to take a job at a company where you push
heroinpain killers on economically distraught communities, if you were not also threatened with being relegated to the same desperate conditions? Who would willing make purposefully addictive Skinner box games and social media sights, if they were not threatened with homelessness and depersoning for failing to pay their 2000 dollar a month rent?How could they possibly ever get people to do these kinds of absolutely necessary jobs if there wasn’t an unspoken threat of starvation, death and violence hanging over everyone’s head. I mean they’d not be able to make all the money that they then hoard.
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.
This. People quickly forget about this:
2008’s free money is gone, COVID-19 free money reprieve is gone, now it’s time to show your work or go bust.
Translation: “We never had an actual business plan.” Which is pretty much every Silicon Valley corp for the last 25 years.
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,
