Netflix fires 300 employees in second round of layoffs Netflix

Netflix announced on Thursday that it laid off 300 employees in a second round of cuts after losing subscribers for the first time in more than a decade.

The cuts accounted for about 4% of the power giant’s workforce, affecting mainly US employees. They came after the company cut 150 positions last month.

“While we continue to invest significantly in our business, we have made these adjustments so that our costs grow in line with our slower revenue growth,”[ads1]; Netflix said in a statement.

Netflix said in February that it had lost 200,000 subscribers globally by the beginning of 2022, and estimated a decline of 2 million users in the coming quarter.

The company blamed the decline on a number of factors, including increased competition, the economy, the war in Ukraine and the large number of people sharing their accounts with non-paying households.

Last month’s redundancies also mainly affected the company’s US workforce. Lawyers and former employees said at the time that the cuts included many employees from under-represented groups, and that the company seemed to also retreat on some of the diverse content it had funded in the years after George Floyd’s death.

“Almost everyone I see on LinkedIn who writes about being laid off worked for diversity, justice and inclusion throughout the company,” former Netflix employee Evette Dionne tweeted that time. “These are not the only ones being laid off, but they make up too many of the 150 for it to be random.”

The company has rejected these reports.

A spokesman for Netflix said that their diverse, audience-focused channels such as Con Todo and Strong Black Lead are a priority for the company, and that they “invest 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 work, including bringing some of this important work internally.”

To compensate for the loss of subscribers, Netflix is ​​also considering adding advertising to the service in return for a lower priced subscription in addition to cutting costs, a move they have long resisted.

On Thursday, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is in talks with several companies for advertising partnerships.

Media reports from earlier this week said it was in discussions with Alphabet’s Google and Comcast’s NBCUniversal for potential marketing contexts.

“We’re talking to them all right now,” Sarandos said at the Cannes Lions conference when asked which company Netflix wanted to work with.