Twitch staff fear further layoffs
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has "shown little tolerance for unprofitable businesses", WSJ claims
Twitch could be considering a further wave of redundancies.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the streaming giant is demonstrating slowing user growth, intimating more cuts may be ahead.
If true, these cuts will come on top of layoffs in March 2023, October 2023, and January 2024, during which at least 900 people were let go.
According to the WSJ, parent company Amazon remains apprehensive about the livestreaming company's profitability. Whilst its revenue is not public, the WSJ has seen internal documents that suggest it pulled in around $2bn in advertising and revenue in 2023. Despite that, however, Amazon is "still losing money."
"Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy, who took over in 2021, has led a profitability review at the company and shown little tolerance for unprofitable businesses," the WSJ said.
Consequently, staff inside Twitch fear the service could become another "zombie brand" at Amazon, similar to Goodreads, which Amazon acquired in 2013.
An Amazon spokesperson told WSJ "it has always taken a long-term view of Twitch and noted its ability to attract harder-to-reach audiences. The company said it remains confident in Twitch’s potential." It also pointed to its lack of competition in the livestream space.
Back in January, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said: "As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organisation based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future."
Twitch recently confirmed it was updating its policies on sexual harassment and "making some clarifications to our sexual harassment policy and sharing more about a new AutoMod category designed to flag chat messages that may contain sexual harassment."
The changes follow allegations that prolific streamer Dr Disrespect had "inappropriate" conversations with a minor via Twitch's platform.
Guy "Dr Disrespect" Beahm recently addressed the accusations relating to his Twitch ban in 2020, confirming he was banned when Twitch learned that he had messaged a minor in 2017.