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    Vox Media Fires About 50 Employees, Scales Back on Social Video

    Job cuts amount to about 5% of staff and primarily effect social video teams at Racked, Curbed and SB Nation

    Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox Media Inc., told employees on Wednesday that 50 people would be laid off.
    Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox Media Inc., told employees on Wednesday that 50 people would be laid off. Photo: Bloomberg News
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    Vox Media is firing about 50 employees, making it the latest digital publisher to scale back on social video in the wake of Facebook ’s decision to reduce publisher content in its news feed.

    The cuts, which primarily affect social video teams at the company’s sites including Racked, Curbed and SB Nation, amount to about 5% of Vox Media’s total staff. An additional 12 people will be offered role changes.

    The layoffs were prompted by the realization that social video initiatives won’t be “viable audience or revenue growth drivers” relative to other investments, given industry changes over the past few months and the company’s own budgeting process, Vox Media Chief Executive Jim Bankoff wrote in a memo to employees on Wednesday.

    “Building a company requires us to take calculated risks,” Mr. Bankoff wrote. “I take responsibility for bets that don’t work out.”

    Several other digital publishers, including Refinery29, BuzzFeed, CNN Digital and Independent Journal Review, have laid employees off in recent months. One factor leading to layoffs has been a decline in referral traffic to news publishers from Facebook.

    In January, Facebook dealt a blow to publishers who rely on the social media platform to reach customers by announcing plans to prioritize posts that are shared and discussed among users and their friends. That change will result in news accounting for about 4% of posts in users’ feeds world-wide, down from about 5%, Facebook said. Facebook also said it would start ranking news outlets based on users’ perception of their credibility to help emphasize trusted sources.

    After the announcement of Facebook’s plans, Mr. Bankoff published a memo saying that Facebook “does not offer a viable path to monetize our in-depth video work.”

    Executives at other news companies—including NBC News Chairman Andy Lack and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp—have called on Facebook to give publishers better opportunities to monetize their content.

    Unlike some of its peers such as BuzzFeed and Vice, Vox Media met its revenue target for 2017 of about $160 million, a person familiar with the matter said. At the same time, it recorded operating expenses of $162 million, making it slightly unprofitable for the year, the person said.

    In Wednesday’s memo, Mr. Bankoff said that the company hit its plan last year and that scaling back certain initiatives is about “being proactive and disciplined about our long term budgets.”

    Vox Media has grown quickly over the last two years, with head count more than doubling to almost 1,000 employees, Mr. Bankoff said. The company has launched new initiatives including a podcast network and deals with video streaming services such as Netflix.

    —Lukas I. Alpert contributed to this article.