Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook firm, is shedding 5% of its employees, in line with a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.
Per the memo, Audible CEO Bob Carrigan praised employees for a powerful 2023 and guaranteed them that the enterprise was in good condition… however, because of the “increasingly challenging landscape,” the corporate remains to be making cuts. It is a widespread chorus within the tech sphere, the place firms throughout all sectors have been beleaguered by ongoing layoffs since 2022.
Audible didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Amazon has been chopping again its workforce aggressively during the last 12 months. Throughout the corporate, in 2023, Amazon laid off around 27,000 workers throughout a number of departments, together with AWS, Twitch and promoting. Now, simply this week, Twitch laid off one other 500 employees, and Amazon’s MGM Studios and Prime Video let go of “several hundred” workers. It’s an ominous time for Amazon’s leisure merchandise.
Prime Video apart, all of those organizations at Amazon — Twitch, MGM Studios and Audible — got here to the corporate through acquisition. Most lately, Amazon spent $8.5 billion on MGM in 2022, which introduced greater than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV reveals to the Prime Video streaming service. Twitch, the gaming-focused livestream platform, got here to Amazon for about $1 billion in 2014. Audible has been a part of Amazon since 2008, when it was acquired for $300 million.
Twitch is massively fashionable, however the prices of working an enormous livestreaming service are excessive, so the corporate has remained unprofitable. For MGM and Prime Video, senior vice chairman Mike Hopkins mentioned the division is making cuts to “reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.”
