In the past month, BuzzFeed ($PRIVATE:BUZZFEED) dropped from 2,330 employees to 2,200. Since July, Vice Media ($PRIVATE:VICEMEDIA) shrunk from 3,450 to 3,356 employees, this all according to employee count data tracked via LinkedIn.
Those drops don't come as much of a surprise — both companies announced layoffs earlier this month — but seeing the trendlines as they turn south provides the direction of where two new media's most-celebrated innovators are heading.
BuzzFeed showed steady, even aggressive growth in employee count on LinkedIn from 2016 through 2017. But in 2018, the number of people listing BuzzFeed as their employer on LinkedIn plateaued.
It wasn't until this month that BuzzFeed saw its first real drop in employee count. The steepest downslope began when BuzzFeed announced layoffs on January 25, 2019 until February 2, 2019. During that time, 91 BuzzFeed employees removed the company as their employer on LinkedIn.
Vice Media has been on an employee-count downslope since last summer when it began a sround of layoffs in Canada. At the time, the company showed 3,450 employees on LinkedIn. Today, that number is 3,360.
On February 1, 2019, Vice Media announced it would layoff 10% of its staff, or 250 employees. On that date, the company's employee count began to drop precipitously on LinkedIn, moving from 3,381 employees to 3,356 in just a week.
These numbers will continue to drop as more LinkedIn members move on to new jobs or simply remove their former employers from their LinkedIn profiles. In the meantime, the visualizations show a somewhat gory depiction of what's happening in new media today as companies look for new growth algorithms and revenue streams.
