Just months away from the 10th anniversary of Amazon’s $970 million purchase of Twitch this August, the streaming site’s CEO Dan Clancy admitted during a live Q&A today that the company is not profitable.
Clancy went live on the official Twitch channel today after officially confirming that the company laid off over 500 staff members yesterday. He was live for just over an hour, fielding questions from chat, and talking more about the business in a refreshingly candid way.
“We’ve implied this before where we need to run it sustainably, but I’ll be blunt, we aren’t profitable at this point,” Clancy said. “Amazon has been extremely supportive of Twitch. A big thing for being sustainable over time is ensuring that we don’t lose money, and that’s a big part of my job, because that’s gonna be what makes sure we can be here for long-term.”
When asked if Twitch was “at risk from getting the axe by Amazon,” Clancy said, “the answer is emphatically, no, not at all” and that “Amazon is very bullish on Twitch” and “they’ve been investing heavily” in the site.
“Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers,” a Twitch blog post announcing the layoffs said. “So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in three or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”
Elsewhere in the Q&A, Clancy addressed Prime Gaming, which he said “is a critical program for many streamers,” which allows viewers to subscribe as part of their Amazon Prime subscriptions. He said Twitch will “continue to evolve different aspects of our program, because part of what I’m trying to do is get us into a framework that can live over a long time.” Clancy said the company will “grow and adapt and change” and there “may be other changes” but “it’s important for us to make sure Prime still exists in some way.”
Clancy also said TwitchCon won’t be going away because “people run conventions all the time to make money” and that the convention is “a very valuable opportunity to bring the community together in person,” confirming that two more TwitchCons are coming up and will be announced “soon.”
The full Q&A is available as a VOD on Twitch’s main channel.
