Friday, the publisher of commercial news announced a scanning of layoffs, which will affect approximately 5% of his total workforce.
A representative of the company confirmed the discounts.
In a note shared with internal staff, the newly appointed director general appointed Sherry Phillips blamed the financial underperformance for the cuts.
“Unfortunately, as most of you know, we did not reach our financial objectives in 2024,” wrote Phillips. “Consequently, we are restarting resources and reorganizing certain areas to increase efficiency and focusing more laser on the central force of our brand. We have made the decision difficult to eliminate certain roles through the company, which represents less than 5% of our workforce. »»
The layoffs follow several similar announcements from other media companies. Vox Media,, Condé NastCnn, The Washington PostAnd Dotdash meredith have all reduced the workforce in the past two months.
Discounts also come in the context of major changes in the landscape of research traffic, stimulated by An update made by Google to the reputation of its abuse site (or SRA) political in October.
From this summer, a number of premium publishers began to see research traffic towards their affiliation weapons fall during the night. Forbes was most strongly affected by the affected publishers, in part because it had built one of the most robust affiliation programs in the media ecosystem.
The SRA update policy, as well as changes in research traffic caused by the proliferation of artificial intelligence, have led dozens of publishers to lose a substantial part of their organic traffic. This loss of traffic results in a drop in advertising, affiliated and subscription revenues.
The drop in traffic and the layoffs are both taking place while Forbes continues to sell to the Koch Inc. in -vestment branch for around $ 570 million. A substantial loss of organic traffic and its resulting income could have an impact on these discussions.
