Twitter has laid off close to 20 employees at its development centre in Bangalore. It has also shut down all global engineering operations from this office, the company confirmed to MediaNama. However, other operations will continue to function in the Bangalore office.
A Livemint report said that the affected employees were working under ZipDial, a mobile marketing company that Twitter had acquired in January 2015. Twitter’s spokesperson told MediaNama that at that time, Twitter had absorbed all of ZipDial’s talent but the current layoffs affected some members from the ZipDial team and those from Twitter as well.
Twitter will continue existing operations in other business functions in India through its offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, and claims that India is one of the fastest growing and key markets for the company.
On the reason behind the layoffs:
“Engineering is a key part of our global company and we continue to focus our programs and efforts on improving the core product experience for our users worldwide. As part of our normal business review, we have decided to stop the global engineering work at the Bangalore development center,” the spokesperson told MediaNama.
Halting of Buy Button feature: In May, Twitter dissolved its commerce team and paused its Buy Button feature, according to a report on Wall Street Journal. The report said that some members of the commerce team have left the company and others have been absorbed into different teams. Twitter had first started testing the Buy Button feature in September 2014 by allowing users to discover products and offers and make direct purchases from within the Twitter app.
Focus on live content and video
Recently in June, during the company’s Q1 2016 earnings call conference, CFO Anthony Noto noted that Twitter will be focusing on live premium content as part of its expansion strategy. The content would be made available to both logged-in and logged-out users. Just month’s later during during Q2 2016 analyst call, COO Adam Bain said “Video is now the number-one ad format in terms of revenue on Twitter”. He added that the Twitter’s blogging platform is now “a video-centric platform.”
For expansion of its live premium content, Twitter was to partner with companies and organizations to add live sports events, news, politics and entertainment, livestream sports events like NFL, elections or video highlights with commentary, relevant tweets, etc.
Financials and Key Metrics
For Q2 2016, Twitter reported:
-Revenues of $602 million for Q2 2016, up 20% year-on-year (YoY) from $502 million revenues reported in Q2 2015. In the previous quarter (Q1 2016), Twitter posted overall revenues of $595 million.
–Net losses of $107 million during, down 21% from $137 million in the same quarter last year (Q2 2015). In the previous quarter (Q1 2016), Twitter posted net losses of $80 million
-Over 313 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, up 3% from 304 million MAUs in the same quarter last year. In the previous quarter, Twitter reported more than 310 million MAUs.
Image credit: Flickr user keiyac under CC BY 2.0
