Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce as tech job cuts top 200,000

Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce as tech job cuts top 200,000

Time Stamp: June 6, 2023 8:00 PM
Source Node: 2705558

Social aggregation site Reddit announced Tuesday it is laying off about 5% of its workforce, or 90 employees, joining a list of other tech giants that have frozen hiring across the globe. The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoff news on Tuesday, citing an email sent to employees from Chief Executive Steve Huffman.

As per the report, Huffman mentioned that the company’s hiring plans for the remainder of the year would be scaled down to approximately 100 individuals, down from the initial target of 300.

The news comes almost two years after the popular social sharing platform secretly filed to go public at a $15 billion valuation. However, Fidelity recently valued the company at just $6.6 billion. Over the years, Reddit has emerged as the epicenter of the meme stock phenomenon, giving birth to the trend. According to a report from The Information, Reddit still has plans to go public later this year.

Reddit is not alone. Tech giants including Meta, Google’s Alphabet, and Nvidia have all taken measures to rein in spending. Other companies like Coinbase, Shopify, Netflix, and Twilio have also announced layoffs. In March, Facebook-parent company Meta announced it would cut 10,000 jobs, just four months after it let go of 11,000 employees, making the social giant the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs.

The global economic downturn that started in the second quarter of 2022 is beginning to have a major impact on tech companies. About 746 tech companies have let go of 202,259 workers, according to Layoffs.FYI, a site that has been tracking all tech layoffs using data compiled from public reports.

According to SimilarWeb, Reddit is the number 20 most visited website in the world. The social platform has 1.75 billion unique monthly users, higher than the Microsoft Bing search engine with only 1 billion monthly unique users.

That’s not all. Reddit is also the operator of online message boards that became the go-to destination for day traders chasing this year’s frenzy for so-called meme stocks. The platform raked in $100 million in advertising revenue for the first time in the second quarter, almost a threefold jump from the same period last year.

Reddit has been growing exponentially since its inception 16 years ago. Today, Reddit has almost 2 billion in monthly traffic. The social news aggregation site has grown to become one of the 25 most-visited websites in the world and the 7th most-visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa Internet data as of February 2021.

Co-founded in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian, Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion platform. As of October 2020, Reddit ranks as the 17th-most-visited website in the world and the 7th most-visited website in the US, according to Alexa Internet.

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