Audible, the audiobook company owned by Amazon, is laying off 5% of its staff, according to a memo leaked by Business Insider.
According to the memo, Audible CEO Bob Carrigan praised staff for a strong 2023 and assured them the business was in good shape … but, due to an “increasingly challenging landscape,” the company is still making cuts . This is a common refrain in the tech world, where companies across all industries are besieged by continued layoffs from 2022.
Audible did not respond to requests for comment.
Amazon has aggressively cut its workforce over the past year. Company-wide, in 2023 Amazon laid off about 27,000 employees across multiple divisions, including AWS, Twitch and advertising. Now, just this week, Twitch laid off another 500 employees, and Amazon’s MGM Studios and Prime Video laid off “several hundred” employees. It’s an ominous time for Amazon’s entertainment products.
In addition to Prime Video, all of those organizations at Amazon — Twitch, MGM Studios and Audible — came to the company through the acquisition. Most recently, Amazon spent $8.5 billion on MGM in 2022, which brought more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows to its Prime Video streaming service. Twitch, the gaming-focused live streaming platform, came to Amazon for about $1 billion in 2014. Audible has been part of Amazon since 2008, when it was acquired for $300 million.
Twitch is very popular, but the cost of running a huge live streaming service is high, so the company has remained unprofitable. For MGM and Prime Video, senior vice president Mike Hopkins said the division is making cuts to “reduce or discontinue investment in certain areas while increasing our investment and focusing on content and product initiatives that have the greatest impact.” .
