Facebook’s parent company Meta will be laying off 10,000 people over the next few months as part of its efforts to achieve efficiency. This fresh round of job cuts means the social platform will have reduced its headcount to about 25% in just four months.
In a letter to employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the restructuring plans were in service of “building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision.”
Zuckerberg also announced that another 5,000 openings would remain unfulfilled.
“With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted,” he said.
‘Flatter is Faster’
In the letter, Zuckerberg announced his efforts to remove multiple management layers from Meta, saying they will ask many existing managers to become individual contributors instead. The chief executive said this is an effort to make the organization flatter and encourage a faster flow of information between workers and management.
“Today many of our managers have only a few direct reports. That made sense to optimize for ramping up new managers and maintaining buffer capacity when we were growing our organization faster, but now that we don’t expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager’s capacity and defragment layers as much as possible,” he said.
Reels Play paused
Meanwhile, shortform content creators will be losing a steady source of income after Meta announced the end of Reels Play bonus.
The invite-only program, which was available to US Instagram creators and Facebook creators globally, gave out monthly payments based on video views.
In an interview with Insider, a Meta spokesperson said the company was pausing the bonus program to invest “in a suite of monetization solutions.”
“Creators can still monetize directly from Meta, and from the support of fans and brand partnerships, all of which have seen significant progress over the past year,” they added.
Even though creators can still monetize content, the end of Reels Play bonus generated negative reactions for creators who had come to rely on the monthly revenue as a dependable and predictable source of income.
“I have been using Reels Play bonuses and have been generating a few hundred dollars per month on the platform. I’m saddened to hear that a program that was being tested in the US, and eventually being rolled out worldwide, was being taken away. I’m remaining optimistic that hopefully Meta will be coming up with an alternative solution for creators, but time will tell,” said Amanda Marcotte, a parenting creator with over 45,000 followers said in a Buzzfeed article.
Paulo Rizal is a content producer for Comms Room. He writes content around popular media, journalism, social media, and more.
