Twitch layoffs hit marketing team

Layoffs at Twitch that have affected more than 500 employees, around 35% of its workforce per Bloomberg, have impacted its marketing team. 

 

Jotham Ndugga-Kabuye, senior director of marketing and head of social media and Stephanie Guzzardo, influencer marketing manager, are among those on the marketing team who announced they were cut from the company on LinkedIn.

 

“Definitely lost some key folks on the marketing side,” Ndugga-Kabuye said via a LinkedIn message, adding that some have yet to announce their departures. “A few of them were L7s like I am.”

 

 

Raymond Segismundo, director of digital marketing and Chris Sellars-Meadmore, creative director, also joined dozens of employees posting that they had been laid off from the Amazon-owned streaming platform.

 

 

Twitch declined to answer how many employees it let go from its marketing team.

 

Bloomberg first reported that Twitch was planning layoffs on Tuesday. On Wednesday, CEO Dan Clancy confirmed the sweeping headcount reduction in a blog post.

 

“Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch,” he said.

 

He added that Twitch paid out more than $1 billion to streamers last year, and while it has worked to become a more sustainable business, it “is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be,” given its size.

 

Twitch has increasingly relied on advertisers to monetize, but hasn’t been able to turn a profit as an almost exclusively livestreaming-focused platform. Meanwhile, every new feature Twitch adds to be more appealing to advertisers contends with user desires to have a relatively interruption-free viewing experience.

 

If an advertiser wants to run a spot, it must either pause the live action of a stream or find a way to run an ad without interrupting the broadcast. But advertisers aren’t keen on paying top-dollar for anything besides a user’s full attention, ideally by fully taking over the stream with an interruptive midroll ad.

 

Clancy will host a Twitch stream on Thursday at 4pm ET to talk about the layoffs in more detail.

 

Amazon also recently cut hundreds of jobs at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios.

 

In March, Twitch laid off 400 employees as Amazon cut more than 18,000 total jobs.

 

Several executives have also announced their plans to depart Twitch in the past few months, including Doug Scott, chief customer officer, Tom Verrilli, chief product officer and Laura Lee, chief content officer. Walker Jacobs, chief revenue officer, departed the company at the end of December and recently signed up with DAZN.

 

Last month, Twitch announced that it was shutting down in South Korea on February 27 because of overly expensive network fees.