Facebook has fired 40 people and has informed the workers to find other job mandates because no work would be given to them in the coming days. The affected department belongs to the LiveRail division and has sparked controversy for the tech company.
According to Business Insider, "Those staffers were part of the account-management and sales teams within the company's "publisher ad-tech group and that recently formed division works across several products, including the Facebook Audience Network that lets brands extend their Facebook ad campaigns on sites and apps other than Facebook, the LiveRail video supply-side platform, and Instant Articles."
However, the company's vice president of ads-product marketing, Brian Boland, admitted that the integration of LiveRail's technology has failed to meet their timeframe and at the turn of 2016, Facebook relocated all of LiveRail's engineers to its London office and what was previously LiveRail became part of more of a merged product within the newly formed publisher ad-tech group, as noted by the same post.
The group that has been let go is a part of a program that provides solutions for publishers and the team works with them in many ways. Despite the confirmation, Facebook remained tight-lipped on the matter but released an official statement. Also, it has been reported in the past by Jobs & Hire that Facebook has linked with native ads to further expand profits and business dominace.
Facebook stated, "Over the past few months, we have communicated our desire to build advertising technology products that create the most value for advertisers and publishers. That meant removing certain parts of the LiveRail business that weren't creating value: we deprecated the LiveRail ad server and removed LiveRail publishers that did not reach our quality standards. Those decisions resulted in the need to re-purpose several roles. While organizational change can be difficult, we are confident that these moves will allow us to continue to grow our publisher monetization efforts with Audience Network and LiveRail."
