The news hit on Wednesday that Netflix is slicing off a massive chunk of its employee roster.
According to Variety, the number of employees Netflix is laying off is massive:
Netflix is swinging the axe — laying off around 1,000 employees, representing 6% of its workforce, in what is its biggest layoff to date.
Most of the layoffs will affect workers in Netflix’s product, technology, legal and HR teams, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters wrote in an email to employees Wednesday morning about the layoffs.
“Our mission — to entertain the world — is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources,” the co-CEOs said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety.
As they go on to say, most of the numbers don't look so horrible, except for one key metric:
Netflix, the industry’s biggest premium streaming provider with more than 325 million customers globally, has posted double-digit growth in both revenue and profits in recent years. In 2025, the company had $45.2 billion in revenue (up 16%) and net income of $11 billion (up 26%). But investors have been concerned that Netflix’s engagement on a per-user basis slowed in the first half of 2026.
It's that metric that has investors concerned. So concerned, in fact, that Netflix is currently experiencing a dip.
Netflix shares: 1D -1.4% 1M -13.9% 6M -34.6% 12M -42.8% The stock is among the S&P's 50 worst performers YTD https://t.co/XWieSP0kTR
— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) October 14, 2026
This is a bad sign for Netflix. People are still subscribed, and people are still watching, but the amount they watch is getting smaller. The thing is, this isn't just happening to Netflix. It's happening to almost every streaming service. Disney, WB/Paramount, and NBCUniversal have all suffered the same issues with their streaming services.
But that doesn't mean people aren't watching television or looking for entertainment. So where are they going?
I covered this a while back, but it still holds today. They're not going to any major brands for entertainment; they're going to others like themselves. Regular people are creating content that interests them specifically, and they're finding it on YouTube.
YouTube is dominating the streaming market by and large, and the numbers aren't even close.
So what does this tell us? Something interesting about the state of major networks, I think. If you were to ask me, they're just not as interesting anymore. The major studios aren't putting out much to keep us entertained, at least not when you compare it to a world where you can have any person go into any interest that you yourself have with a level of expertise you might not. It's easier to have a YouTube video playing that you don't have to necessarily commit to while you do other things as well.
But underneath that, it's just more honest. A person on YouTube talking about something they have a genuine interest in is far more substantial and interesting than a studio that buys up a brand or franchise and hands it off to whoever, not caring how it turns out because they don't feel connected to it at all.
The benefits of just heading to YouTube far outweigh the ones offered to you by streaming services that have proven they don't care about what you think and likely don't like you anyway. To them, you're a number. To a YouTube creator, you're (hopefully) a person who finds what they're talking about just as interesting as they do, and can engage in the conversation.
I don't see this getting any better for the streaming services unless they can actually begin pushing out things you'd clear your calendar for.
