Wattpad lays off 15% of its staff, blames changing economic environment

Difficult economic situations are affecting corporations of all sizes, leading to job cuts. Storytelling platform Wattpad introduced Tuesday that it has laid off 42 of its 267 folks workforce — that’s almost 15% of the employees. It should present a minimum of 12 weeks of severance and 6 months of continued advantages to the departing workers. Plus, they are going to be allowed to maintain office-allocated gadgets resembling laptops.
In a weblog publish, the corporate blamed the economic environment for the cost-cutting measures and stated the layoff impacts all its divisions.
“As you all know, the worldwide economic actuality over the previous 12 months has essentially modified – and like different companies, we’re not immune. Regardless of our greatest efforts over the previous a number of months to restrict the affect of the changing economic environment, right this moment, we’ve made the tough however obligatory determination to scale back our workforce,” The corporate’s interim president KB Nam stated.
“This doesn’t imply that these workforce members haven’t been an essential half of our work. It’s essential to notice that these selections are in response to changing enterprise realities and wishes, and are under no circumstances a mirrored image of particular person contributions. Everybody at Wattpad has achieved an incredible quantity and had a constructive affect on our firm.”
Final 12 months, the corporate appointed Naver Webtoon’s Nam because the interim president after Jeanne Lam decided to leave. In 2021, Wattpad turned an element of the South Korean firm Naver after a $600 million acquisition.
Final June, the corporate launched a brand new creator program that would pay writers as much as $25,000. It additionally launched a brand new measurement metric referred to as “Engaged Readers” for writers.