Twitch to Lay Off 35% of Its Staff

Thom Carter

10 January 2024, 10.10am

report twitch to lay off 35 percent of its staff

News of the layoffs come ten months after it was announced that the company would let go of 400 of its workers.

Twitch, the popular streaming service owned by Amazon, is to cut 35% of its staff—or 500 jobs—Bloomberg has reported. Citing people familiar with the matter, the reduction in headcount could come as early as this week.

News of the layoffs comes ten months after it was announced that the company would let go of 400 of its workers in a bid to boost Twitch’s longer-term business outlook.

“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” Dan Clancy, the company’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”

However, reducing its headcount has not been the only cost-saving measure undertaken by Twitch recently. In early December, Clancy announced that the business would no longer operate in South Korea—despite the country boasting a top ecosystem for esports.

The move was made due the costs of operating there being “prohibitively expensive,” and despite the company trialling money-saving measures such as reducing stream quality to a maximum of 720p.

“Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss,” wrote Clancy at the time, adding that “unfortunately there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country.”

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While costs to operate in Korea are higher than in other countries, running such a large-scale video streaming platform will always be an expensive affair. In another previous blog post from Clancy, the chief executive said that live video costs for each top creator is more than $1,000 per month.

Twitch sees around 7 million streamers go live on it each month, with around 35 million daily visitors. In 2022, over 1.3 trillion minutes of content were watched on the platform.