Redundancies Coming To A Media Company Near You?

I remember being made redundant a good few year ago. The bottom fell out of my world as I had a fair amount of debt. But now its the best thing that ever happened to me. But its difficult for many that are finding themselves in that situation to be just as positive as we're getting ever closer to Christmas and the likelihood that this will be the "deepest recession for 80 years.

Yesterday I heard of a PR company in Manchester (not one of my clients) that made people redundant with half an hour's notice. And today I see that the Blogging solutions provider Six A Part is shedding around 8% of its staff because of the economy and the uncertainty it brings.

We've got another 2,000 jobs from Virgin Media going and the TUC says that an average of 1,000 jobs are being lost per day.

Now I'm glad that I'm self employed and got a buffer to protect me from any downturn in earnings. But its still a worrying time for my friends in the networks, agencies and merchants. I've already heard of restructuring in the affiliate industry (please don't ask what it is because of not saying). And I've also heard of some networks severely cutting their marketing budgets.

Now there'll be the usual numpties that have their head up their backsides and imply that you shouldn't be honest with what's going on and you shouldn't mention the "R" word when it comes to the affiliate marketing industry because we want everyone to think that our industry is impervious to market forces and the wider economic downturn (right?)

Even though the affiliate marketing industry is a robust one, largely based on performance, I feel that there'll be some tough times ahead. Merchants will demand more bang for their buck. And I see leaner, meaner networks such as Paid On Results do well and the chickens will come home to roost for those networks that became fat on the profits of past actions that some disagreed with (I'm being so restrained here).

I have an un-natural focus on business efficiency and value for money, in time I hope the industry can look back, as I did to the past down-turn, and think "actually it was good for us".

Update: I've just been watching the Bank Of England press conference (sad I know). It looks like we're in for a deep but short recession. Inflation will fall back down towards the 2% mark - mainly because of the reduction in mortgage repayments. However, CPI (consumer price inflation) which is as a result of "excess" demand could go negative next year. Overall it looks like the economy could shrink by around 2% in 2009. Not good at all.