Thread by @HNIJohnMiller

1) So, something about the recent layoffs at Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Vice, and soon to be others that I want to bring up real quick.

2) Sorry, got sidetracked looking at old financial statements and wanted to rewrite this bit. Anyways, the running theory was that Obama's (on paper anti) propaganda program ran out of money with the government shutdown, which caused the cut off of cash flows to these businesses.

3) The most important thing to note, and I'm including some drafts of Buzzfeed's financial statements from 2014 and back as a reference, is that these businesses weren't necessarily unprofitable BEFORE the Obama propaganda program. documentcloud.org/documents/2271…

4) See, here's the thing: sites like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Huffington Post GREW in the later half of the Obama administration. However, in a fit of irrational exuberance, they wildly overestimated their ability to generate revenue with the explosive growth of the internet media.

5) Buzzfeed alone missed its revenue goals by something in the order of 20% in 2017, for example. variety.com/2017/digital/n…

6) So, right away, what we might in fact be seeing is the companies downsizing and laying off excess staff (IE, all the people who managed Buzzfeed's quizzes) to bring their costs in line with their revenue.

7) But why now, why in the beginning of the year in between the government shutdowns?

Well, as an accountant, I can actually confidently state this hypothesis that will likely be true.

They're called fiscal years.

8) Essentially, companies can, but don't always, go by calendar years. They can actually pick effectively any day of the year to be the 'start' of their fiscal year, and that 365 day period is what they base their taxes around.

9) Now, I don't know what Buzzfeed, HuffPo, Vice, their parent companies, etc date their fiscal years as. But what I DO know is that adjusting the size of your workforce right around the turn of a company's fiscal year in order to manage revenue projections is standard practice.

10) And seeing as this is a month or so before tax day.... yeah. We might be seeing a bunch of media companies at the turn of the fiscal year realizing at once, "Oh, fuck. A bunch of pink haired androgynous wierdos DON'T generate revenue by publishing endless bitchy op-eds."

11) And then proceeded to dump them all to the curb. CYA!

No propaganda slush fund, no sudden wake up and conservative revolution in these companies, just bog standard corporate business practices.

/end