American online video-sharing and social media platform YouTube has announced a plan to eliminate 100 jobs amid wider layoffs at its parent company Google.
The layoffs are reported to be part of efforts by the video platform’s parent company, Google, to trim costs as it embraces Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Announcing the layoff, YouTube’s chief business officer, Mary Ellen Coe wrote in a note to employees,
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“We have made the decision to eliminate some roles and say goodbye to some of our teammates. Anyone in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region who is or may be impacted will be notified by the end of today”.
The layoff affects staffers on YouTube’s creator management teams, which will now have leadership dedicated to each country, as opposed to regions.
Several reports claim that the recent layoffs at YouTube are happening after the platform has struggled to fully recover from an advertising slowdown in the past year, which has seen it contend with strong rival TikTok.
The platform responded by launching TikTok-style formats such as YouTube shorts, a service offering vertical video, that enables users to scroll infinitely. Despite YouTube claiming success, reporting 5tn cumulative views on Shorts in January 2022, the service however failed to scale TikTok’s heights.
In its third-quarter earnings in October 2023, YouTube revenues fell 2 percent to $7.1bn, versus analysts’ expectations for an increase of 4.4 percent. It was the first decline in YouTube ad sales since the company started reporting its performance separately in 2020.
This massive decline has forced YouTube’s parent company Google, to look for more ways to cut costs and generate more revenue.
Last Thursday, the company eliminated more than a thousand jobs from its core engineering division; its voice-operated product, Google Assistant; and some projects involving augmented reality, the technology that combines the real world with a digital overlay.
A spokesperson at the company said in a statement
“As we’ve said, we are responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead. To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
In a note to employees on Wednesday, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai disclosed that employees should expect to see more cuts for the rest of the year, but not as big as what the company experienced last year.
Googlers should expect more job cuts, warned CEO Sundar Pichai. In an internal memo shared with The Verge, Pichai said that the company will be “investing in our big priorities this year” and has to “make tough choices” to support them. The news comes just days after Google axed more than 1,000 roles across numerous divisions, including advertising sales and devices-and-services. Pichai noted that the next cuts would not be as large as last year’s, when Google laid off about 12,000 people. Amazon, Apple, Citigroup and other major companies have also announced cuts in recent weeks. Many of the job cuts and hiring freezes are, perhaps unsurprisingly, tied to companies’ growing focus on AI — not just at Google, but also at Duolingo and Salesforce.