Amazon's Twitch To Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

According to Bloomberg, Amazon's livestreaming site Twitch is expected to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers. 'The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months,' notes Bloomberg. Slashdot reader quonset shares the report: Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch's reliance on Amazon's infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are 'prohibitively expensive,' according to a blog post he wrote. Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon's acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch's chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon's Ads unit. 'It's always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,'' a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. 'We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.