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As Facebook\u2019s<\/a> advertising business continues to grow globally<\/a>, the social network\u00a0is also streamlining operations in certain markets. TechCrunch has learned that Facebook is consolidating\u00a0sales operations in Europe focused on small and medium businesses. In the process it is laying off around 30 people including employees in\u00a0Hamburg, according to a source among those cut.<\/p>\n 30 is a small proportion\u00a0of Facebook\u2019s overall employee count of\u00a015,724 (as of the end of September). It\u2019s notable for a company that has not made regular practice of laying people off.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear what the\u00a0subtext might be for this latest cut, if any. Facebook declined to provide a comment for this story (we\u2019re still asking).<\/p>\n From what we understand, the\u00a0company\u2019s SMB director\u00a0in Europe, Middle East and Africa,\u00a0Stefanos Loukakos, who is\u00a0based out of Facebook\u2019s global headquarters in Dublin, made the cuts\u00a0to\u00a0consolidate\u00a0SMB operations across fewer locations.<\/p>\n Our source said that the\u00a0Hamburg office covered Facebook\u2019s SMB business, selling ads in Facebook and Instagram in German-speaking markets (Germany, Austria and Switzerland); as well as Turkey and Israel \u2014 regions that will now be covered from SMB sales offices in Dublin and Lisbon.<\/p>\n There will still be SMB activity in Hamburg and across Germany, where Facebook does\u00a0some marketing outreach to SMBs\u00a0in the form of online content<\/a> and events.<\/p>\n Other\u00a0small rounds of layoffs this year have pointed to bigger thematic changes\u00a0at the company. They included around 40 people<\/a>\u00a0going in the wake of Facebook\u00a0restructuring parts of its\u00a0ad-tech business, specifically at LiveRail, which has since been shut down<\/a>.<\/p>\n There were also reportedly around 15-18 contractors\u00a0let go<\/a> who had been working on Facebook\u2019s Trending team, a group tasked with curating news for Facebook. News has been a problematic area for the social network for a while<\/a>, but it\u2019s come into the spotlight especially this year, as many have accused Facebook of being a haven for\u00a0disseminating fake news<\/a>. Facebook\u2019s still trying to fix this<\/a>.<\/p>\n Turning back to today\u2019s news, in\u00a0September, Facebook announced that it had hit 4 million advertisers<\/a> on its platform, and while it does not break out specific numbers or the performance of specific regions, it\u2019s been long understood\u00a0that small and medium businesses form a large part of that base, both in the U.S. and internationally.<\/p>\n But over the years, there have been some\u00a0tense moments between Facebook and SMBs<\/a>, as Facebook has sought to build out more of its paid ad products over organic reach (that is, unpaid distribution) on the platform.<\/p>\n More generally, Facebook\u00a0has been shuttering parts of its ad business that are seeing less activity. Just last week, it\u00a0closed down the ad-serving part of its Atlas platform<\/a> to focus on Atlas\u2019s measurement tools.<\/p>\n In the German market, meanwhile, Facebook has not been a\u00a0stranger to regulatory heat, specifically from the country\u2019s data protection watchdog. In March, it became the subject of an antitrust privacy probe<\/a>, and in September Germany was the first country<\/a>\u00a0in Europe to order Facebook to stop tapping into data from WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. (That\u2019s\u00a0now\u00a0extended <\/a>to all of Europe.)<\/p>\n We\u2019ll update this story as we learn more.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Sean Gallup\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/D-_7dLGFr4o\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Facebook\u2019s advertising business continues to grow globally, the social network\u00a0is also streamlining operations in certain markets. TechCrunch has learned that Facebook is consolidating\u00a0sales operations in Europe focused on small <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-1770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t