The popular book publishing and online reading platform Wattpad announced yesterday that it fired 16% of its workforce – a total of 42 workers – to “limit the impact” of a challenging macroeconomic landscape.
In a blog post published and written by the software-as-a-service company’s Interim President, KB Nam, Wattpadd told its employees that the decision is being made after nearly doubling the firm’s headcount in the past couple of years.
“The reality is the conditions that have historically enabled us to make bold moves have changed, and we are operating in a very different environment today”, Nam reflected. He added that this environment is pressuring the leadership team to “recalibrate” things based on the “current business needs and realities”.
All teams within the company will be impacted by these involuntary departures. Wattpadd said that it is offering its laid-off employees a minimum of 12 months of severance and six months of continued benefits. In addition, they will get to keep the equipment that the company has assigned to them such as their laptops and other similar devices.
Wattpad Joins the Growing Chorus of Tech Companies that are Actively Right-Sizing
Many tech companies these days have been making similar moves, not solely due to the changes that the global economy is experiencing, but also as they went on a hiring spree during the pandemic to respond to the growing demand they were experiencing while people remained confined within their homes.
Wattpad generates revenue via the adverts that are displayed within the book reading app and also through subscriptions paid by users. There are two types of premium subscriptions and the two are ad-free.
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The Premium package costs $4.99 per month and lets users download their favorite publications to read them offline, along with other perks like bonus coins for every purchase. Meanwhile, the Premium+ subscription costs $7.49 per month and gives users the benefit of unlocking two paid stories every month.
Nam is being forced to make this difficult decision for the organization roughly three months after being appointed to his current position. Nam came to replace Jeanne Lam after she abruptly departed the company to “pursue new ventures”.
More Details About Wattpad
Wattpad was founded in 2006 by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. The platform claims to have a user base of more than 90 million readers, 90% of which are millennials and Gen-Zers. In addition, the company says that over 300,000 writers from 35 different countries publish their content on the platform. This content is available in more than 50 languages.
The SaaS company was acquired in 2021 by South Korean internet conglomerate Naver for over $700 million and was later merged with Webtoon Studios, a subsidiary of the Asian enterprise, to create synergies that may allow published within Wattpad to turn their stories into TV shows, movies, and other mass-market formats.
In February this year, Wattpad announced the premiere of Prime Video’s trailer of a home-brewed story called Perfect Addiction, which was created by one of the platform’s writers – Claudia Tan. The movie is scheduled to premiere on 24 March on the video-streaming platform owned by Amazon (AMZN).
Tally of Laid Off Tech Workers
The number of tech workers that have been laid off this year is rapidly approaching the 130,000 mark according to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi. Wattpad’s numbers have already been included in the list.
Both small and large companies have been making cuts across their entire organizational structures to deal with the changes that the economic landscape is experiencing. Just yesterday, we reported that Atlassian, the Australian company behind the workplace productivity solutions Jira and Trello, laid off 5% of its workforce while both Twitter and Meta have been actively reducing their headcount as well.
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