Netflix announced Thursday that it will lay off 300 employees in a second round of job cuts after that lost subscribers For the first time in more than a decade.
The cuts amounted to about 4% of the broadcast giant’s workforce, and mostly affected American employees. They came after the company cut 150 jobs last month.
“As we continue to invest significantly in the business, we have made these adjustments so that our costs grow in line with our slower revenue growth,” Netflix He said in a statement.
Netflix He said In February, it lost 200,000 subscribers globally at the start of 2022, and predicted a drop of 2 million users in the next quarter.
The company blamed the decline on a combination of factors, including increased competition, the economy, the war in Ukraine, and the large number of people sharing their accounts with non-paying families.
The layoffs in the past month also mostly affected the company’s workforce in the United States. Advocates and former employees at the time said the cuts included many employees from underrepresented groups, and the company also appears to be holding back some of the diverse content it has funded in the years since George Floyd’s death.
“Almost everyone I see on LinkedIn posts about layoffs works on diversity, equality, and inclusion across the company,” former Netflix employee Evette Dionne Tweet at that time. “These aren’t the only people who have been laid off, but they make up too many of the 150 to be so coincidental.”
The company denied those reports.
A Netflix spokesperson said its diverse audience-focused channels such as Con Todo and Strong Black Lead are a priority for the company and that they are “investing heavily in them.”
“We are committed to inclusion on screen, behind the camera, and in our workforce,” he said. “We are making changes to how we support our publishing efforts, including bringing some of this important work within the company.”
To offset subscriber losses, Netflix is also considering adding ads to the service in exchange for a lower-priced subscription as well as cutting costs, a move it has long resisted.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said Thursday that the company is in talks with several companies for ad partnerships.
Media reports earlier this week said it is in discussions with Google’s Alphabet and Comcast’s NBCUniversal for potential marketing relationships.
“We’re talking to all of them now,” Sarandos said at the Cannes Lions conference when asked which company Netflix is looking to partner with.
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