Discovery.com Workers Get Pink Slips
Discovery Communications Inc. dismissed a large portion of the staff running its Web operations Monday, as executives shifted their online strategy to focus more on the company’s core television business.
The Bethesda, Md., firm, which also owns popular cable TV channels and 160 retail stores, announced it would fire 40% of the 200 full-time workers employed by Discovery.com, as well as about 150 contract workers who helped run the site.
Online offerings focused on such things as pets and lifestyles now will take a back seat to more consumer-friendly, revenue-generating topics such as education, health and travel, company officials said.
Within the next several months, Discovery’s Web site will be redesigned to more prominently display the company’s television properties, including TLC (the Learning Channel), Animal Planet, the Travel Channel and Discovery Health.
“We cannot achieve near-term profitability from the Internet as a stand-alone business,” said Michela English, president of Discovery.com, who also will oversee the electronic-commerce transition. “Based on the changing market conditions in the Internet business, the revenue streams are growing at a slower pace than some had projected.”
English declined to comment on severance packages the company offered full-time employees, saying it would be unseemly to discuss personnel matters. But two Discovery employees who spoke on condition of anonymity said most full-timers were being offered three months’ pay, plus one extra month for each additional year they had worked at the firm.
Discovery’s electronic-commerce efforts will fold into a new unit, Discovery Commerce, that combines catalog, retail-store and online operations with book and home-video sales and licensing.
“It surprises me a little bit, because the parent company has been among the most forward-looking and really tried to integrate its cable properties, magazines and Web site,” said Daniel O’Brien, a senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm. “They were doing all the right things.”
English declined to provide information about the dot-com unit’s losses. Privately held Discovery is owned by Chief Executive John Hendricks, Liberty Media Group, Advance/Newhouse Communications and Cox Communications Inc.
