It seems many of Wattpad's stories became a reality.
The popular online social reading platform recently announced it is laying off some of its employees to offset the effects of the "changing economic environment" on itself.
This layoff is the first Wattpad executed since the pandemic started. The last time Wattpad initiated a mass layoff was in mid-May 2017, per Beta Kit.
Wattpad 2023 Layoff Details
Wattpad president KB Nam mentioned in its announcement that it is sacking 42 of its 267 employees, or 15% of its workforce, to compensate for the effects of the changing economic environment. KB Nam didn't mention if the layoffs would affect the whole company or if they would affect only one or a few departments.
The company's president mentioned that it hired nearly 100 new employees over the past two years as COVID-19 affected people's working conditions at the time. It also leveraged its growth and the economic conditions at the time to invest in new technologies and hire the previously mentioned people to work within it to develop innovative tools and resources for the Wattpad community.
However, the easing of travel and lockdown restrictions and the global economic recession forced it to cut costs and rethink its ability to retain many of the employees it previously hired in the past two years.
KB Nam framed this layoff as a "necessary change" for itself and its future success as it shifts towards a "more focused approach" to nurturing writers and providing them with what they need to create the stories they want to write.
Despite that, KB Nam stresses that it is not laying off the 42 employees because they weren't an important part of its work. Instead, they said that everyone in the company had accomplished a lot and had a positive impact on it.
"It's important to note that these decisions are in response to changing business realities and needs, and are in no way a reflection of individual contributions," KB Nam added.
The company will provide the employees it would be laying off with a twelve-week severance pay as a minimum, along with six months of continued benefits. They will also get to keep their laptops and other devices.
Wattpad's Post-Pandemic Mass Layoff
Interestingly, this layoff is the first time Wattpad initiated since 2017, when it laid off 10% of its workforce to allow the company to focus on emerging products, machine learning, data, science, and Wattpad Studios.
Wattpad's then-CEO, Allen Lau, mentioned that it wants the company to utilize machine learning to make it capable of identifying the next "Harry Potter" writer before anyone else and even help the writer and their story gain traction among the Wattpad community.
What Is Wattpad?
Wattpad, according to Internet Matters, is an online social reading platform that encourages users to write and share their own stories in all genres and share them with the world.
The company first came up in 2006, and since then, more than 90 million people used its platform to read and write stories. 90% of its users are aged 13 to 40 years old.
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