Media Companies Posting Their L's: Google, Amazon, Instagram, Disney All Laying Off Employees

Held over from Thursday, so you know it's all the hottest breaking newzzz!

But I added a lot more than you saw on Thursday.

The Biden economy's so hot even the tech giants are shedding staff.

Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures.

The cuts come as Google looks towards "responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," the company said in a statement.

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Google is increasingly focusing on investments in artificial intelligence, as is rival Microsoft, with the latter introducing a Copilot feature that incorporates artificial intelligence into products like search engine Bing, browser Edge as well as Windows for its corporate customers.

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The cuts follow pledges by executives of Google and its parent company Alphabet to reduce costs. A year ago, Google said it would lay off 12,000 employees or around 6% of its workforce.

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Google is not the only technology company cutting back. In the past year, Meta -- the parent company of Facebook -- has slashed more than 20,000 jobs to reassure investors. Meta's stock price gained about 178% in 2023.

Instagram is also cutting 60 jobs.

Instagram has cut 60 technical program manager positions, eliminating a layer of management at the company, according to a new report from The Information. The impacted employees have two months to apply for other jobs at the company. After the two month period, their employment will be terminated if they are unable to secure a different role at the company.

Amazon, which bought Twitch for some reason, is now cutting staff at the Porn For Kidz site.

Amazon is laying off about 500 employees in its Twitch livestreaming unit, an executive overseeing the unit wrote in a memo to staffers.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the cuts were being made in an effort to "rightsize our company."

Amazon also cut staffers in its Prime Video and Amazon Studios units on Wednesday.

is laying off about 500 employees in its Twitch livestreaming unit, an executive overseeing the business wrote in a memo to staffers Wednesday.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the cuts were being made in an effort to "rightsize our company" and align its headcount with the current size of the business.

Amazon acquired Twitch for almost $1 billion in 2014. The site is most known as a popular livestreaming platform for video gamers.

No, it's not. It's best known for Twitch Thots who show their tits and camel-toes and do porny ASMRs for children, begging kids to send them cash.

Twitch thots are always "accidentally" showing their nipples. After a Twitch Thot stopped pretending to accidentally show her nipples and just showed her nipples while daring Twitch to ban her for it, Twitch changed its terms of service to allow women to show their nipples to children. They called this "Artistic Nudity."

They then walked that back and now Twitch Thots will be forced to the old system of "accidentally" showing their nipples again.

Amazon is also cutting staff at their Amazon Video studios.

By the way, Amazon will start blasting commercials into your face on Amazon Prime starting January 29, unless you fork over another $3 per month.

NBC "News" is also laying off its, giggle, "journalists."

NBC News was undergoing a series of layoffs across the division on Thursday, impacting what was described as a double digit number of employees in its workforce.

A source familiar with the plans said that the number of those laid off would be in the 50 to 100 range out of several thousand employees...

The job cutbacks are the latest to hit a media outlet, with other organizations taking more severe action to trim their staffs. CNN cut hundreds of employees in 2022, while NPR last year trimmed about 10% of its workforce. The Washington Post recently offered buyouts that saw the departure of many well known journalists as it sought to cut its staff by 240.

Disney is also laying off workers at one of its four failing movie companies, Pixar.

Disney-owned animation studio Pixar is poised to undergo layoffs this year, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed. While sources at the company said the layoffs would be significant and as high as 20% -- or reductions that would see Pixar's team of 1,300 dropped to less than 1,000 over the coming months -- Pixar says those numbers are too high.

Oh, Pixar says? Well no one at Disney ever lies, so.

Imagine having not one but four separate movie divisions and seeing them all fail massively at the same time.

And then, for some reason, you get to keep your job, claiming "Covid did it." No really, they're still saying that The Bob Iger Grooming Company is seeing every division and every movie bomb due to covid.

How bad is The Bob Iger Grooming Company doing? This bad: For the first time in history, Disney and the Disney-bought-and-ruined company Pixar have been shut out of nominations at the biggest animation award show.

For the first time in 32 years, Disney and Pixar films were completely shut out of the Best Animated Feature category at one of Hollywood's major animated awards bodies.

Though Disney released both Elemental and Wish to theaters in 2023, neither film landed among the nominees in the Annie Awards' top bracket, marking the first time that's happened since the category was introduced in 1992.

The Annie Awards honor the best in animated excellence each year, and are often a predictor of the Best Animated Feature Oscar contenders each year -- with Disney and/or Pixar scoring big nominations (or victories) for Best Animated Feature at the Annies every calendar year for over three decades.

Die, media. Die screaming.

Update: Disney is re-releasing movies they claim didn't get enough exposure due to having been released during covid.

The first one of these films to be released is Soul. But Disney's hopes for Vengeance Box office are dashed. The film made $99 per showing.

Less than a hundred buck per showing. That's like 8 tickets.

Thanks to andycanuck.

Update: Film Threat raved about The Beekeeper.

A note on bias: Chris Gore is biased in favor of a healthy Hollywood industry. This causes him to really go crazy for mid-budget films, which Hollywood has all but abandoned in the age of Marvel.

It doesn't mean he's a bad critic -- just that he gets especially positive for a certain kind of mid-budget movie that Hollywood used to make a lot of.

Is he overdoing it here? I dunno, but I intend to find out. I'll be seeing it this week. I was going to see it yesterday but then I got tired and lazy. Went to bed by 9:45 pm.

Gore also went bananas for the "Big Straight Energy" of the romcom Anyone But You.

As with actioners, Hollywood all but abandoned romcom in favor of nothing but CGI-filled blockbusters. Those, and Diverse Oscar Bait Snoozers.

Allen Ng is less invested in the health of Hollywood and said both are good. Not a rave, but he said they were worth seeing.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:55 PM

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