On Wednesday, YouTube laid off workers from its operations and creator management teams, joining firms like Twitch and Amazon in reducing headcount to reduce costs.
These cuts come less than a week after YouTube's parent company, Google, announced that more than 1,000 employees were to be let go across multiple divisions.
The YouTube cuts are much smaller in comparison, about 100 of its 7,173 employees according to the New York Times. As first reported by Tubefilter, the cuts are partially a result of a larger restructuring effort that will localize global teams that provide support to YouTube's creators. These teams were previously run in a more piecemeal fashion, with employees in one country reporting to managers in a completely different region.
YouTube has reported slowing ad sales as the economy tackles rising inflation, but layoffs across the tech industry at large are complicated by the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence. As companies look to fund their forays into AI, they inevitably cut corners elsewhere. It was reported that layoffs of contract workers at language learning app Duolingo, specifically, resulted from the company's planned focus on AI content creation.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, warned in a note to employees on Wednesday that further cuts were on the horizon. But he also assured staff that those future layoffs would not rival the size of 2023 cuts, namely the 12,000 people the company let go in January of 2023.
