Twitter to cut 9% of workforce in hopes of becoming profitable

Twitter is cutting 9% of its workforce in an effort to make itself profitable as soon as next year. The announcement comes after several large companies including Disney and Salesforce considered buying Twitter and then declined to follow through. From the LA Times:

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Initiatives such as streaming live video of NFL games are helping boost ad sales at Twitter, but not quickly enough to justify what investors and analysts have complained is a bloated workforce out of sync with the company’s prospects. Several other firms, including Salesforce.com Inc. and Walt Disney Co., have considered and then rejected the opportunity to acquire Twitter in recent weeks…

The belt-tightening targets some departments beyond sales. Hours after the earnings announcement Thursday, Twitter said it would shut down its Vine video app “in the coming months.” Twitter acquired the six-second looping video app months after its founding in 2012. It developed a loyal following, but demand sank as users slowly found more intriguing tools and financial incentives on other social media apps.

Twitter also announced Thursday that it had 317 million active users each month. However that figure hasn’t grown much over the last year. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also indicated there would be some changes to how complaints and harassment are handled starting next month:

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Dorsey said November would bring updates to the way Twitter handles concerns about harassment, bullying and other unwanted interaction between users. He didn’t go into detail about those changes or about expected experimentation with the app’s posting process.

Harassment has been a constant problem on Twitter with high profile complaints from people on both the left and the right. Thus far the “Trust and Safety Council” created by Twitter to deal with the problem has been given poor reviews on the right.

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