So I've been half-watching the Twitter/Musk soap opera like everyone else this week, and honestly I don't have anything new to add to that pile-on. Every tech blog on earth is doing the "what does this mean for the deal" post right now and I don't want to be blog number 4,000 saying the same three sentences about bot percentages. What actually stopped me mid-scroll yesterday was smaller: Netflix cut about 150 jobs on Tuesday, and a big chunk of them were the people who ran Tudum.
If you don't know what Tudum is, that's kind of the point. It's Netflix's own fan-content site, launched last year as this glossy hub full of behind-the-scenes stuff, cast interviews, trivia, the occasional "explained" article for a show's ending. I read it exactly once, when I wanted to know if a Bridgerton character was going to show up again, and then never went back. Apparently a lot of people did the same thing, because the layoffs hit the editorial and social teams there hardest.
I don't think this is really a Tudum story though. I think it's a "the subscriber growth story is over and now they have to act like a normal company" story.
Go back to April for a second. Netflix's earnings call that month was the first time in over a decade they'd actually lost subscribers instead of gaining them, and the stock did the thing stocks do when Wall Street feels betrayed, dropping something like 35% in a single day. On that same call they said the quiet part out loud: password sharing has to get dealt with, and there's going to be a cheaper ad-supported tier at some point. Two things Netflix spent a decade insisting they'd never do. Now, a month later, the belt-tightening is showing up in actual headcount, and it's landing on the parts of the company that were never core to the product, just nice-to-have content marketing around the product.
That's the part I keep chewing on. Tudum wasn't a bad idea exactly, it just always felt like a solution in search of a problem. People don't come to Netflix short on things to watch, they come to Netflix and can't decide what to watch, which is a completely different problem and one a companion fan-wiki doesn't solve. I remember reading the launch announcement last year and thinking, who is asking for this. Not "who would click it if it existed," everyone will click something shiny once, but who was lying awake wanting a Netflix-branded content hub. I don't think that was ever a big number of people, and now the org chart agrees with me.
(Small tangent, not really related, but I currently have Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, and Paramount+ all installed, and I use maybe two of them in a given month. I keep meaning to prune this down and I never do, because canceling something feels like admitting defeat for some reason. That's a me problem, not a Netflix problem.)
The password sharing thing is the piece I actually care about, selfishly, because my account is split three ways between me, my sister, and a cousin who I'm fairly sure hasn't opened the app in eight months but still "uses" it in the sense that his login exists. If Netflix actually starts charging for that, or locking it to a household the way they've been testing in a few countries, that math changes for a lot of people all at once, not gradually. And an ad tier only makes sense to me if it's genuinely cheap, like meaningfully less than what I pay now, not a token two-dollar discount with ads bolted on. We'll see. They said "later this year" for both of those, which in corporate-speak could mean September or could mean next March.
Anyway. The layoffs themselves aren't a huge number in the scheme of a company with something like 11,000 employees. But it's the first time in a long while that Netflix has cut instead of hired, and once a company that used to be defined by unstoppable growth has to start trimming its content-marketing experiments, that tells you more about where things are actually headed than any earnings call jargon does. I'd rather watch what they cut than listen to what they announce.