Flipboard’s Reportedly Cutting 21% of Staff Following Struggling Digital Ad Business

Declining digital advert revenues and a shaky financial horizon pressured main information aggregator Flipboard to chop almost 1 / 4 of its total workers final week. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue confirmed the layoffs in a latest Axios report. 

“Yes, we restructured due to the bad economy and tough outlook for the digital ad business,” McCue instructed Axios. “As a result we had to make the painful decision to let 24 members (21%) of the team go. We’re doing everything we can to support them through this transition.”

Flipboard launched 12 years in the past with the vision of turning into the, “one place to find the stories for your day,” amid a rising cacophony of choices exploding in the course of the early cellular economic system. The firm labored to attain that objective by means of a mixture of partnerships with internet publishers and scraping the open web, a apply that briefly landed them in some authorized sizzling water.

Much has modified since 2010 although. On the curation facet, Big Tech backed aggregators like Google and Apple News have come to dominate the house and threaten smaller providers like Flipboard. Recent information additionally recommend a rising part of customers are apparently burned out on information. A latest Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism poll discovered 38% of individuals surveyed stated they usually or generally averted studying the information. That’s up from 29% in 2017. Honestly, who can blame them?

Worse nonetheless, the wavering digital promoting house continues to take a toll on content material firms. Meta, as soon as seen as a poster baby for by no means ending progress, lost $250 billion value of worth in a single day earlier this 12 months following poor promoting progress numbers. Those identical points triggered Snap to report the worst progress in its 11 12 months historical past. Not lengthy after that dismal day, Snap laid off 1,000 of its workers. Media funding agency GroupM predicts an advert income progress industry-wide of simply 8.4% in 2022, down considerably from 24.3% progress final 12 months.

Flipboard didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for remark.