Maybe a few more ads in the middle of the thing I'm trying to watch, with no way to pause or rewind to catch what I missed, will do the trick.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
217 points (97.8% liked)
Gaming
20062 readers
56 users here now
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
When did that start? I used to be on Twitch 4-5 years ago, but never went back since then.
I don't remember ads at all back then
Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.
I mostly watch YouTube streamers. Once in a while they'll do a Twitch stream and holy shit it's night and day. 0 ads on YouTube and 30 second and even sometimes 1 minute unskippable ads constantly interrupting the stream on Twitch. I honestly have no idea how people put up with it. I cancelled cable because I didn't want to watch ads, I'm not going to a site that does the same.
My adblock blocks the ads, but I still get that stupid purple screen. What really annoys me is that it's a minute and a half long. Twitch really wants me to disable ad block so I look at an ad on a Livestream for almost two fucking minutes.
I minimize and do something else until then but that's asinine.
hold on, you mean to tell me a platform that exists and is known purely for LIVE streaming content has put ads OVER the livestream interrupting your view? what kind of idiot would have approved such a service killing move?
As a mod, you can postpone an ad by 5 minutes 3 times. You can't postpone it by 1 minute, you can't choose to play them during downtime, you can't do shit but pray an interesting moment doesn't happen during the 1 minute.
Adblockers still work so I've never seen ads on twitch
You know what that means: Gifting a sub with Prime is about to go away and so are all the loot drops with Prime. Also, more no opt out ads, longer preroll ads, and a larger list of partnered games getting headway.
So you know typical enshittification stuff.
This always makes me wonder how their operation can be so pricey.
It sounds more like their human resource cost is just absurd, not that their underlying technical operation is the problem. Plus assuming they did any calculation on the ads at all, their server usage should pay for itself as more load means more views means more ad impressions.
But what does Twitch need X-thousand people for if they still cannot do anything about curating content with those endless people? All I see of them is someone writing flip-flopping statements about whether nudity on stream is okay or not, always depends on which month it is it feels like.
Video encoding is an expensive operation and probably the second largest cost next to wages. And apparently they aren't even on an AWS SLA.
AN AMAZON SUBSIDIARY NOT ON AN SLA
Are they really a revenue sink to cover up taxable income?
Shouldn't the encoding happen locally, on the user's computer, before it's even sent to Twitch?
load more comments
(1 replies)
If you are bad at your job, you lose your job. If the CEO is bad at their job, you lose your job. If the CEO is REALLY bad at their job, they get a golden parachute.
I simply don't believe this. They probably don't count all the gamers, who get Amazon prime for all the twitch loot. Then you also have people who throw around subs like confetti. Thot streams.
I simply don't believe this.
Best financial analysis I've ever heard. But maybe look up video hosting and streaming costs before speculating so confidently?
very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.
live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That's why twitch still don't have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Subs of which they can often take 50% commission on.
It is believable when you remember that American companies simply don't need to be profitable anymore
Get a better CEO then.
Idk that homeless guy looks like he’s got it figured out!
Maybe he should take a big pay cut if he's doing that bad a job
Is our business plan out of touch?
No, it's the employees who are wrong.
Oh please they couldn’t fucking handle moderation I don’t trust them to handle fucking money either.
Let it rot
What’s your alternative? YouTube?
Kinda? Though they need a better discovery page for live streams.
Maybe we don't actually need 10 hours of video game playing and bikini wearing at a time. Maybe that's not a good product.
Justin.tv 2.
load more comments
(1 replies)
One has to wonder if they just split off adult content into a separate platform using the same Amazon logins, and including cross-platform notifications one way from the twitch site to the adult site whether it would solve both their cash flow and advertising problem.
Or just buy Onlyfans. 😅 For Onlyfans it'd solve their payment issues: Amazon allows using it for payment, and Amazon is big enough that Visa and MC cannot just threaten it.
Where's that article that shows firms that make workers redundant are worse off in the long run when one needs it? Fuck these cunts. Maybe we should just get rid of capitalism instead.
I've never understood the appeal of watching twitch streams, I enjoy the edited compiled stuff with all the boring moments cut out that ends up on YouTube sometimes, but I see no point in watching a dude eating and drinking and staring at his monitor and shouting out to viewers.
Actively, no, but passively on a second monitor, I occasionally join in the discussion in chat. Finding a smallish streamer who actually reads you messages is nice.
Maybe then watch better streams. I usually watch streamers play games while talking to the chat or commenting on the gameplay, while I play a similar game. It's entertaining.
There's a lot more than just dudes eating and shouting.
Is it the infrastructure costs? I imagine that costs quite a bit
They pay themselves for infrastructure costs effectively, so it would be the wholesale price. Would love to see their actual accounting book, public data says they made 2.8 billion, would love to see where it went.
I’ve heard (yes anecdotal) that on the books, Twitch pays AWS full retail for server time.
Makes me wonder if that’s done on purpose? Amazon just wants to kill Twitch and rent out IVS (their internal system) to other streaming platforms (like they do for Kick). THAT is outside money coming in.
Why should AWS subsidize Twitch?
From the point of view of AWS, they make money whether they host Twitch or some other streamer. If Twitch can't make money paying retail hosting, the decision of what to do with it has to be made by people who control Twitch.
Why should AWS subsidize Twitch?
Because they kinda do it for every service of them, the point is to spread to all the markets with subsidies until kill the competition, and then keep a marginal profit to avoid competition while still makes a marginal profit (what in scale is a big profit anyway). This is usually what these megacorps do.
Do they? I wouldn't be surprised if AWS even charges Amazon.com full retail for hosting. The point is the company has a lot of different business units that report up to the CEO, and business units generally act like mini companies.
The accounting of charging full retail to other business units is a lot cleaner than giving preferred rates and making it harder to understand the finances of what is going on with the different business units.
A CEO may be willing to operate a business unit at a loss for strategic reasons, but they have to understand that said business unit is costing the company money.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Imho you're wrong there.
Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.
Both to audience and shareholders. It'll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.
This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.
They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.
load more comments
(1 replies)
They recently left South Korea too.
Data is surprisingly cheap. It's more than likely just reinvesting any profits into growth to boost stock price/investment. A lot of companies are hitting the point where growth is leveling off, so they've switched to cutting costs
Bandwidth, which you need for streaming is not cheap
They thought the party was going to last forever, so they ordered a bunch of jumbo pizzas and kegs
I mean it's more like they paid themselves a bunch of bonuses and hired super duper growth hacking experts or whatever, and now they can't pay for them, so god forbid they cut from the top
view more: next ›