Amazon Layoffs: Amazon has acquired live streaming platform Twitch. Amazon is going to lay off at least 500 employees i.e. about 35 percent.
Amazon has acquired live streaming platform Twitch. Amazon is going to lay off at least 500 employees i.e. about 35 percent. Bloomberg’s report states that layoffs at Twitch can be announced today, Wednesday, January 10. The layoff reports come after several top executives left the company in a span of a few months. Online retail giant Amazon has announced its biggest ever corporate job cuts in 2022. Under which it was expanded to 27,000 posts. This continued with a new round of cuts to its music segment in October.
In 2023, several top executives, including Twitch’s Chief Product Officer, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Content Officer, had announced to leave the company. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked at Twitch from Amazon’s ad unit.
Twitch executives told Bloomberg that despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, running a large-scale website that supports 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is extremely expensive.
In December Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where costs are expensive, according to a blog post he wrote. Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years.
According to Bloomberg report, even nine years after the company was acquired by Amazon, this business is not making profit. Since taking over in March 2023, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has been on a cross-country charm offensive to improve relationships with gaming celebrities who stream live on Twitch.
Many of those legions expressed displeasure with Twitch’s original approach to ads, which the company reworked after criticism. Streamers have praised Clancy’s willingness to listen to their concerns after years of complaints that the service was out of touch with its users. However, the new chief has struggled to curb losses. Twitch conducted two rounds of layoffs last year as part of broader job cuts at Amazon, cutting more than 400 positions.
