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Citing slow revenue growth, the streaming giant Netflix has laid off 300 employees in the second round of job cuts. The entertainment company released 150 full-time employees, as well as many of its contractors and part-time workers in May. The cuts will affect departments throughout the company.
“Today we sadly laid off around 300 employees,” a company spokesman said. Variety. “While 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. We are so grateful for all they have done for Netflix and are working hard to support them during this difficult transition.”
Netflix’s fortunes have surprisingly declined over the past year due to greatly increased competition from newly formed streamers, including Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV Plus and Peacock. After years of comfortably controlling the market, the company lost close to 70% of its value at the end of the fiscal first quarter after it was announced that the cutting-edge streaming service had lost 200,000 subscribers and is expected to lose another two million in the next room.
Although the company once served as an umbrella service for movies and series from various companies, the recent rise of competitors in the market, especially entertainment giants like Disney, which owns thousands of titles that once streamed on Netflix and now streaming exclusively on its own service, has forced Netflix to reassess its strategy, relying more and more on original content and raising its subscription prices.
The company appears to be fully committed to its spending on content, with a budget of $17 billion in 2022 for original shows and movies. Whether that programming will be enough to keep its current employees’ jobs secure and keep its viewer base from bleeding out remains to be seen.
