this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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"As 'sustainably' as possible." I love that one, because it makes it sound like they're being kind to nature.
Nope, just profit.
Even in financial terms "sustainably" always pisses me off. None of these companies are trying to sustain, they demand constant growth to be happy. Never ending growth is never sustainable.
Never-ending growth may not be sustainable, but it is growable.
Clearly they mean that they want the growth to be "sustainable", not the company..
I know corporate America doesn't really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, "sustainable" in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn't operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won't pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.
Is twitch or prime video even profitable? I’m pretty sure twitch isn’t but prime might be just due to locking people in to making their e-commerce purchases on amazon
It all depends on Amazon's accounting, and whether or not they want it to be profitable.
They can pretend that people are subscribing to prime just for the videos, and then it becomes profitable. Or, they can pretend that people are subscribing to prime for the shipping, and prime video is just a loss-leader they use to encourage people to subscribe.