Twitch will be laying off approximately 35% of its staff, or 500 of its employees just after the company laid off 400 employees last March 2023, as reported by Tech Crunch, citing Bloomberg as their source.
The layoffs, as per Yahoo News, may occur as early as this Wednesday, as it comes amidst Twitch's losses and the departure of many senior executives within a short period of time.
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Twitch is set to close its operations in South Korea in February 2024.
Twitch, the large-scale website that supports 1.8 billion hours of live video content each month, is reportedly incredibly expensive, amounting to about $1,000 per month as per the Tech Crunch report. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has also stated that the firm will also be pulling out of South Korea due to "prohibitively expensive" pricing.
Amidst expensive operation costs and Twitch reportedly having its popularity having risen since the pandemic lockdown, Reuters adds that the Bloomberg report states Twitch still proves to be unprofitable during Amazon's nine-year acquisition.
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Twitch Leadership Change
This newest round of layoffs follows the company's leadership change last 2023, wherein CEO Emmett Shear resigned and had Dan Clancy become the CEO of the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform.
According to Yahoo News, the new CEO has since then had difficulty cutting costs but has been welcomed by streamers after seeing Clancy's willingness to hear their issues. Most especially after Twitch's decision to rework its move to focus on advertisement income instead of content after several streamers took offense on the move.
During Clancy's leadership, however, Twitch has also seen over 400 jobs being laid off during Twitch's two waves of layoffs last year. Several high-ranking officials, including the chief product officer, chief customer officer, and chief content officer of Twitch, also announced their resignations in the last few months of 2023. The top revenue officer of Twitch, who was employed by Amazon's Ads division, also left the company.
Big Tech Layoffs
Twitch's recent layoffs is reportedly a part of Amazon's continuous wave of layoffs across its intermediaries. In 2022, the massive online retailer started the largest-ever layoffs in business history, eventually reducing staffing levels to 27,000 positions overall.
It went on in October when the company's music division-which includes its digital music marketplace and audio streaming platform-saw further layoffs.
Big Tech, in general, has seen a great deal of layoffs as Tech Crunch found that over 240,000 jobs in the IT sector have been lost in 2023, a number that is reportedly already 50% greater than it was the previous year and continues to rise.
Large-scale layoffs earlier this year were reportedly prompted by major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta, and Zoom. Cuts were also announced by startups in a variety of industries throughout the first half of the year. Even though there was a slowdown in tech layoffs throughout the summer and autumn, it seems like they are starting up again.
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