These really are my least favourite articles to write; listing which companies have recently laid off a handful or more of employees. This time around we are looking at creator economy companies who have laid off staff as of this month. Oh the joy…
Before we begin, it is worth noting that since May, at least 25 companies in the creator economy space have laid off employees. What is sad is that according to Crunchbase, funding for VC-backed creator economy startups topped $939 million in 2021. This golden era seems to be coming to some sort of halt as creator economy startups grapple with a looming recession.
To begin, Pinterest confirmed to The Information that it had laid off staffers in December. The social-media platform, known for its mood boards, did not share the exact number of employees affected. The app also cut back on its creator-monetization efforts by ending its “Creator Rewards” program last week.
We couldn’t ignore the whopping statistic presented by Meta who, on November 9, laid off more than 11,000 employees, which equates to around 13% of the company. In 2021, after rebranding from Facebook, the company’s stock price fell by about 70%. The company will also be extending its hiring freeze into the first quarter of 2023.
Another social media giant, Twitter, has seen issue after issue since Musk’s takeover in October of last year. One of these is that on November 3, Twitter sent an email to its staff confirming layoffs. More than 1,000 people had already been let go by around 11 p.m. PST, hitting every department and ranging from the US to the UK to Singapore.
Noteworthily, Cameo, a platform that lets fans pay for custom video recordings from celebrities and influencers, laid off 80 staffers in November, its second round of cuts following the 87 employees who were laid off in early May — roughly a quarter of its staff. Cameo CEO Steven Galanis confirmed the layoffs in a November 9 tweet: “Today at Cameo, I made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our team in order to adjust to the worsening macroeconomic environment,” he wrote on Twitter. “To those impacted today, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”
Additionally, Patreon laid off 85 people in September. The layoffs affected the company’s go-to-market, operations, finance, and people teams, per a memo from Patreon CEO Jack Conte. The company also closed its Dublin and Berlin offices.
“Over the last 9 months, we’ve seen the tech industry — and the whole economy — change considerably,” the memo says. Conte added that the pandemic allowed the company to build an “an operating plan” to support “outsized growth.”
Furthermore, 1,200 staff members were lost to Snap in August meaning that Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, cut 20% of its workforce in August following two consecutive quarters of slowed revenue growth impacted by ongoing struggles within its advertising business.
Masterclass, which hosts celebrity-taught classes, also laid off 20% of its staff in June. “I made the really hard decision to reduce our team by 20% to adapt to the worsening macro environment and get to self sustainability faster,” CEO and founder David Rogier wrote on Twitter in June.
Finally, Linktree, the Australia-headquartered link-in-bio startup, which enables users to promote multiple hyperlinks in their social media bios, laid off 17% of its workforce, per an August 8 memo shared by co founder and president Anthony Zaccaria.
Zaccaria said the company sought to scale with ambitious hiring targets last year, and he had predicted favourable economic conditions would persist into 2022.
