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Night Light | Get Twitch or Die Trying
Reed Duchscher
March 17, 2023
Reed of the Week
This is the second time in a month that the CEO of a major platform is stepping down (YouTube got a new CEO last month), and it feels like we're seeing a major shake-up at the top of the digital content world. Between leadership turnover, fierce competition in both short-form and livestreaming spaces, and creators openly bargaining against platforms for better terms, it has def been a challenging environment to be a leader at the big tech social and video companies recently.
Twitch's new CEO will be former president of 3 years, Dan Clancy, whose most recent blog post focused on walking back premium revenue share deals for popular streamers on the site. In the past, competing platforms like YouTube have been able to lure top talent away from Twitch with better deals. Some have been successful, and others haven't (RIP Mixer). Kick is the latest service to enter the live-streaming wars, offering streamers better monetization and non-exclusivity options than Twitch, but it also brings its own set of problems. I'm interested to see if Twitch's new leadership will place more emphasis on retaining and investing into its biggest stars.
Given that Twitch is transitioning from a founder CEO to its first hired CEO in the Amazon-era, I don't have a lot of optimism. Recent history has shown Twitch to be profit-first. But there's never been more competition in the live-streaming space. With more competition hopefully comes more innovation, differentiating features, and better communication with streamers. My bet is platforms that succeed will be the ones that best cater to the needs of their creators and the communities they cultivate.
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