Twitch is no YouTube or Instagram. Is that because of management, or because there aren't many people who want to watch someone else play video games?
Amazon bought Twitch, the livestreaming platform, 10 years ago, with the hopes it would be buying the next YouTube or Instagram — an up-and-coming media app that would explode in popularity and profit when hooked to a Big Tech platform.
Instead, The Wall Street Journal reports, Twitch has fizzled: It's losing money on annual revenue of $2 billion — a nothingburger by Amazon's standards — and usage seems stalled.
This year, the company reportedly cut a third of Twitch's staff, and there's worry about its place in Amazon at a time when CEO Andy Jassy is looking to tighten the company's focus.
The Journal digs into complaints from current and former Twitch employees about management, including Dan Clancy, who became CEO last year. I have no idea how to judge those critiques — and Amazon told the Journal it's committed to Twitch over the long term.
But I also wonder how much of Twitch's problems are Twitch problems, and how much of it is a category problem: Are there that many people who want to watch someone play video games — the primary use case for Twitch livestreams — or anything else, live?
I've spent time in the past interviewing streamers, trying to understand what they do and why people watch them because I don't get it. But I worry that when I talk to those folks, I end up coming off like Steve Buscemi — or worse.
So I asked a livestreaming veteran who lives in that world to try to decode the WSJ piece for me; they asked to keep their name out of this because they don't want to upset their employer.
Here's their TLDR: