Alphabet joins a growing list of companies cutting employees

Tech companies are turning up the heat on employees, and no one is safe. Alphabet is the latest one to cut jobs amid a slowing advertising market. But among the other ad giants, Alphabet may be the more resilient one…

Tech companies are turning up the heat on employees, and no one is safe…

• Meta recently cut hiring plans and gave a warning to underperforming employees.
• Microsoft, one of the better performing tech giants in 2022, announced job cuts this week.
• Amazon hasn’t publicly announced plans to reduce hiring — but admitted that it over-hired in its warehouses.

Add Google to the list: The advertising market has slowed significantly, and the largest ad giant, Google, is preparing for a downturn by slowing hiring and cutting some jobs.

Among other ad platforms, Alphabet’s ad business is known to be more resilient:

• Performance: Alphabet’s primary ad business, Search, offers performance marketing where advertisers pay when someone clicks on a Google Search link, guaranteeing clicks.
• Impressions: Other ad platforms — Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok and Meta — charge users based on views, with no results guaranteed.

During a slowdown, performance marketing is safer as advertisers are more likely to reduce impression-based marketing first.

Helps explain why $GOOG is only down 23% this year — far outperforming the other ad giants. Alphabet is also the most diversified among the big ad platforms (excluding Amazon).

Ad results: Snapchat is the first of the ad platforms to report earnings on July 21. It’ll be a telling sign of how much the ad market is really slowing.