Twitch CEO explains why they’re done offering massive contracts to streamers
Instagram: DJClancy999Twitch’s CEO Dan Clancy has explained why the Amazon-owned platform is done offering huge contracts to streamers.
After already cutting roughly 400 jobs early last year, on January 9, 2024, Bloomberg reported that Twitch was set to lay off a further 35% of its current staff.
A handful of the Amazon-owned platform’s employees were shown the door amid widespread layoffs which the company’s CEO Dan Clancy confirmed in a blog post.
Just a few days later, Clancy went live on the platform to answer questions from the community, where he revealed that Twitch isn’t currently profitable. Not only that, he explained why Twitch is done offering massive contracts to the biggest creators on the site.
Twitch will no longer sign streamers to massive contracts
In the last half-decade, we’ve seen major strides from rivals such as YouTube, Facebook, Mixer, and more recently Kick, overtake Twitch’s spot in the streaming industry — spending millions signing streamers to multi-year contracts.
While Twitch fought back and signed numerous top streamers to deals, it appears they’ll no longer be pulling out their checkbook.
Speaking in a live Q&A on January 11, Clancy, who was appointed as Twitch’s CEO in early 2023 after company co-founder Emmett Shear stepped down, explained why the platform is no longer offering massive contracts.
“I can tell you the cost of retaining those streamers would have been far more than the revenue generated,” he said. “That is something we’ve been very clear about, we don’t want to do that.”
He added: “Because the only way to do that then is to have this unbalance where we make up for that on smaller streamers and we don’t want to do that.”
Nevertheless, it’s not exactly surprising to hear given Twitch’s huge change in direction in October 2023. After years of locking creators to streaming just on their platform, the platform updated guidelines to remove rules prohibiting “multi-streams” that prohibited streamers from broadcasting to several sites at once.
