Twitch warns US sub price increases “extremely likely” after international updates::undefined
After already reducing the creator cut and increasing ads… super curious what their books look like.
Everyone’s commenting on their books but twitch’s published numbers are all bullshit pretending they’re paying market rate for AWS when they obviously get a deal being a subsidiary of Amazon. IIRC their last attempt to show they needed to up prices even had them using non-bulk AWS rates which they obviously wouldn’t pay even if they werent owned by Amazon.
Also Twitch has historically been profitable in Europe (or maybe it’s just Western Europe? Can’t remember). Something that Twitch generally keeps quiet but the French streamers I follow never forget to point out when Twitch publicly whines about their supposed nonprofitability.
Which means that NA can’t be that far behind given that the US has higher GDP/capita (buy I guess lower engagement). So when you are combining that information with their bulk discounts, it’s for sure profitable there.
Now maybe Twitch truly isn’t profitable in poorer regions like LatAm where infrastructure costs don’t scale down as fast as sub prices and ad revenue. But regarding Europe and NA, they are openly bullshitting.
They are still losing money, but in the way that all tech companies spending every dollar that comes in so they can expand and build a monopoly loses money.
How much closer to market capture do they need to be?
Not that I will ever watch streaming. But it seems to have captured whatever market there exists for it.
With moves like that, I’m guessing that they’ve never been even close to being in the black.
They’ve never once made money. Twitch is a massive money pit where 99% of the creators on the platform are explicitly leeching while bringing nothing by way of income.
“Extremely likely” – says the only entity in control of the price. What are the odds? Who knows! It’s extremely likely!
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I hope to one day have enough free time to want to watch someone play video games unedited for hours at a time, let alone be willing to pay money for the privilege.
It’s insane to me that these people have viewers. What are people doing with their lives
Many put them on in the background, like radio
I imagine most people are just trying to survive.
Pathetic.
Just popping in here to toot my own horn:
I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.
When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.
EDIT
https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127
(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)
Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.
I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.
If Amazon is sinking money into it, someone somewhere sees a path to profitability. I can’t imagine why they’d invest all that money only to shut down one of the internet’s largest brands.
Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.
Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).
MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.
The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.
However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?
Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.
Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.
Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.
But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.
Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.
Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.
I’ve gotten so many messages over the last few months about price increases on everything from my internet to the toll lanes in my region. Absolutely everything is going up in price right now and t It’s just unsustainable.
Submarines are expensive everywhere, not just US. Rich people usually settle with Yachts.
