Ad tech firm Quantcast cuts 6% in headcount as economic storm clouds gather

A Quantcast spokesperson was unable to officially respond to Digiday’s request for comment on the developments which are said to have been announced last week.

Although, according to LinkedIn, the number of Quantcast employees was in the region of 700 (as of August 4). Such a statistic would indicate that the ad tech company’s recent reduction in headcount led to approximately 40 people losing their jobs.

The developments emerged during the same month as fellow marquee companies in the space also announced layoffs.

On July 26 it was reported that Israel-based content recommendation outfit Outbrain laid off 3% of its workforce, amounting to 38 employees. Meanwhile, earlier in the month, Insider reported that NextRoll, a company formerly known as AdRoll, had reduced its headcount by 3%.

Ad tech companies may have received something of a reprieve recently when Google announced that it would postpone the depreciation of third-party cookies – the very bedrock of automated media trading – until late 2024.

However, prior to this, the early grumblings of the prevailing gloomy economic outlook prompted many media buyers to probe the efficiencies of their online media spending, leading to a notable contraction in the number of intermediaries they do business with.  

The spread of unease in the media industry is now starting to spread to digital – long the sole dynamo driving growth in the sector – with even household names such as Facebook and Google now starting to tighten their belts.

Elsewhere in the media industry, the terms ‘cutbacks’ and ‘layoffs’ have become all too common an occurrence.

Since mid-May, Digiday has reported how successive names from the gaming and eSports sector, another industry vertical that was said to have received a boon from the Covid-19 pandemic, have been hit with multiple cutbacks.

What is evident is that the digital media sector as a whole is about to undergo one of its most testing periods since its very inception.