Netflix announced Thursday that it laid off 300 employees in a second round of job cuts after losing subscribers for the first time in more than a decade.
The cuts accounted for about 4% of the streaming giant’s workforce and affected mostly U.S. employees. They came after the company cut 150 jobs last month.
“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,” Netflix said in a statement.
Netflix said in February that it had lost 200,000 subscribers worldwide by early 2022 and expects a 2 million drop in the next quarter.
The company blamed the fall on a number of factors, such as rising competition, the economy, the war in Ukraine and the large number of people who share their accounts with unpaid households.
Last month’s layoffs also mostly affected the company’s workforce in the United States. Advocates and former employees said at the time that the cuts included many employees from under-represented groups and that the company also appeared to be withdrawing some of the diverse content it had funded over the years since George Floyd’s death.
Ted Sarandos, content director and co-CEO of Netflix, at the Cannes Lions summit on Thursday. Photography: Eric Gaillard / Reuters
“Almost everyone I see on LinkedIn posting about the layoff was working on diversity, equity and inclusion in the company,” former Netflix worker Evette Dionne tweeted at the time. “These aren’t the only people fired, but they’re too much of 150 for it to be a coincidence.”
The company has denied these reports. He did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment Thursday.
To make up for subscriber losses, Netflix is also considering adding advertising to the service in exchange for a lower-priced subscription in addition to reducing costs, a move it had long resisted.
On Thursday, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is in talks with several companies for advertising collaborations.
Earlier this week’s media reports said he was in talks with Alphabet’s Google and Comcast’s NBCUniversal for possible marketing links.
“We’re talking to all of them right now,” Sarandos told the Cannes Lions conference when asked which company he wanted to partner with Netflix.