UPDATED 21:10 EDT / JANUARY 09 2024

APPS

In another cutback, Twitch lays off 500 people, 35% of staff

The Amazon.com Inc.-owned livestreaming platform Twitch will reportedly lose about 35% of its staff in another round of layoffs, Bloomberg reported today.

The layoffs, which will number about 500, are expected to be announced Wednesday. This follows two earlier rounds of layoffs in 2023, which amounted to around 400 staff losing their jobs, while the company has also seen the departure of some of its top executives in recent months.

Twitch might be an incredibly popular online live streaming platform, but the company has always struggled to turn a profit. It has remained unprofitable since Amazon acquired it almost 10 years ago. Despite seeing a large increase in user numbers during the COVID-19 lockdowns, along with policy changes designed to bring in the money, Twitch has stayed in the red.

Even with Amazon’s infrastructure to help with the 1.8 billion hours of live-streaming content Twitch supports each month, the costs outweigh the profits. The company last year moved to a new ad revenue model, the Partner Plus program, but many streamers criticized the program, complaining that the requirements set by Twitch were out of reach for many streamers.

Things went from bad to worse last month when Twitch shut down one of its biggest businesses, South Korea, with the company saying that the network fees there were “prohibitively expensive.” Chief Executive Dan Clancy wrote in a blog post, “Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately, there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country.”

The stresses of looking down at continual losses have taken their toll on the executives who are charged with turning things around. As 2023 came to an end, Twitch saw its chief product officer leave the building, as well as its chief customer officer, chief revenue officer and chief content officer.

The bad news at Twitch followed earlier layoffs at its owner. Amazon announced that about 10,000 corporate and tech employees were to collect their final paycheck late in 2022, but that number increased to 18,000 sometime later. An additional 9,000 left in March 2023 as the company attempted to rein in operating expenses.

Photo: Caspar Camille Rubin/Unsplash

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