Amazon rolled the Twitch IP into AWS as a service that other people buy called Interactive Video Services ("IVS") [1]. Twitch uses this but so do third parties like kick.com. Is Amazon charging Twitch a reasonable fee for whatever AWS resources they use?
So is Twitch actually losing money or has the profit just been shifted to AWS? It's unclear. Or has profit been siphoned away with the revenue cut Twitch gets from Amazon's ad platform?
Amazon has an incentive to present Twitch as unprofitable as it uses that narrative to reduce the revenue cut streamers get from subscriptions and ads.
Lastly, over the last few years Twitch has hugely ramped up ad density (IIRC it is as high as 8 minutes per hour and a minimum of 4 minutes). To entice streamers with a higher ad density, Twitch has removed the exclusiviity clauses that Twitch partners used to have. How much money has this cost Twitch? Streamers can now use Twitch, for example, to simply drive traffic to Youtube.
just my opinion.
And shout out to Asmongold streaming to tens of thousands of people on his unpartnered second channel, costing Twitch ~$20k per stream in lost revenue. Unfortunately, they're going to force him to monetize that channel soon. ;p
-- (apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)
