Follow
Nowadays it seems that Google buys companies one after another, flooding our news feed with details about rumored or confirmed acquisitions. After Quest Visual and Divide both announced they would be joining Google’s team, the freshest data available show that YouTube is buying Twitch for a bit over $1 billion.
Twitch is not the most popular start – up you know everything about, but, to paraphrase Daniel Bean, Twitch is a tech – mammoth, even if you don’t know this. The gaming live streaming service platform is so successful, in fact, that it competes with Amazon, Hulu and Facebook in terms of traffic, outranking all these three tech players during peak hours.
Twitch also harnesses the power of almost 45 million unique visitors monthly who pay for video ads and subscriptions.
So if this company is so successful, how come it is for sale?
Twitch has a very large pool of fans and interesting sources of revenue, but technically speaking, the Twitch platform can crumble under its own popularity at any given time. Poor image quality, lags whose duration is beyond absurd, management and maintenance costs that exceeded everybody’s expectations, these are all good reasons Twitch is looking for an investor.
They say Microsoft tried to make an offer to them, but the Twitch team didn’t want to be bound to the XBOX One for life. Instead, seizing the opportunity, Google sent YouTube to welcome Twitch to the big Google family and make it an offer. And the fact that YouTube is buying Twitch is a good thing for everybody involved in the process, companies and end – users alike.
According to Hayden Dingman from PC World,
Yes, investment cash could help Twitch build out for the long haul, but beyond the $1 billion, Google offers already-established infrastructure. Google offers (presumably) full YouTube integration, so there would be no more need to archive a video on Twitch, download it, and then upload to YouTube—an archaic and awful process people endure because they know the real money is made through YouTube and not Twitch. And most importantly, Google offers an enormous audience—the type of audience that probably doesn’t even know what Twitch.tv is.
Looking at the bigger picture, YouTube, and implicitly Google, wins over a larger audience and new and interesting sources of revenue without much effort. People know that YouTube didn’t succeed in becoming the favorite game live – streaming platform available, or at least not in comparison with Twitch. Therefore, buying the company and integrating Twitch into YouTube makes a lot of sense for both companies. While the actual purchase date still needs to be announced, all who cover this topic applaud the fact that YouTube is buying Twitch.
