Amazon is the latest to start slashing jobs. In all, 18,000 employees are set to receive their severances.
One of the underlying premise of Bill C-18 is this idea that “big tech” is absolutely flush with cash and can afford to do pretty much anything they want at this point. This notion has been heavily challenged thanks to a massive wave of layoffs throughout the sector that has been going on since at least November. Last year, Meta slashed 13% of its workforce in all. Among the tidbits of information that came out of that is that advertisers are looking at the first half of 2023 and foreseeing a recession.
Anecdotally, Freezenet has been unable to escape this massive drop in advertising revenue either. In 2021, the months of November and December were actually profitable for Freezenet. This, of course, sparked transparency posts about where the money went (website debt that has become a thing due to server and DNS costs). November and December of 2022, however, saw revenue down far below what we normally pull in on a normal month. In fact, comparing November of 2021 and November of 2022, revenue dropped by 86%. Traffic in those same time periods were pretty much the same as traffic saw a huge spike in November of 2021 while day-to-day traffic was up in 2022. To say 2022 sucked would be an understatement.
Side note, readers are still able to support Freezenet via Patreon or Ko-Fi if they want to help this great project thrive. In the mean time, we’ll do what we always do: figure out a way to keep the lights on. We did it for over a decade so far, so I think we have proven that we are at least reasonably good at doing that.
Ultimately, everyone is feeling the pain of, once again, seeing advertising pull their dollars. Thanks to fears of recession, it seems like everything is in a state of contraction. Amazon is, of course, no exception to this. News surfaced today that they are making their single biggest job cut in their history. The BBC is reporting that Amazon is axing 18,000 jobs:
Amazon plans to cut more than 18,000 jobs, the largest number in the firm’s history, as it battles to save costs.
The online giant, which employs 1.5 million people globally, did not say which countries the job cuts would hit, but said they would include Europe.
Most of the job losses will come from its consumer retail business and its human resources division.
Boss Andy Jassy cited the “uncertain economy” for the cuts, saying it had “hired rapidly over several years.”
“We don’t take these decisions lightly or underestimate how much they might affect the lives of those who are impacted,” he said in a memo to staff.
He said the announcement had been brought forward due to one of the firm’s employees leaking the cuts externally.
“Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year,” he added.
So, definitely a very different picture to witness amidst all of this talk about these companies making money hand over fist and needing to share the benefits with everyone else. If anything, this shows that the money at these companies are by no means infinite. It appears that financial pain is only set to continue for the foreseeable future in this sector.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
