• Netflix shares sank up to 6% after a Q3 earnings beat and weak guidance for the rest of the year.
• Shares had fallen about 44% in the last year as investors worry about slowing growth.
• The streaming leader laid off about 1,000 employees last week and changed its content leadership.

Netflix's third-quarter earnings failed to excite investors, a week after a major content executive shuffle and its biggest round of layoffs since 2022.

The streamer turned in results above expectations for the third quarter, but provided weak guidance for the rest of the year. Netflix said its earnings beat was primarily due to the timing of expenses.

Netflix's revenue growth slowed for a third straight quarter, and the company projected it would continue to decelerate in the fourth quarter.

Shares fell up to 6% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

"While Netflix is growing, the pace of that growth is slowing," Forrester's Mike Proulx said. "That's a wake-up call for the company that once defined the streaming market and is now in need of growth reacceleration."

Here's how the streaming giant's Q3 financial results compared to the company's forecast:

• Revenue: $12.87 billion vs $12.86 billion estimated ($11.5 billion in Q3 2025)
• Earnings: $0.87 per share vs $0.82 per share estimated ($0.59 per share in Q3 2025)

Netflix told investors to expect earnings of $0.67 per share in the fourth quarter, below Wall Street's $0.73 per share estimate. The company's $13.44 billion revenue projection for Q4 was also lower than analysts' estimate of $13.51 billion.

The streaming leader cut its annual advertising forecast from $3 billion to $2.7 billion, citing a slower-than-expected rollout of its ad products.

"With Netflix under pressure to find alternative lines of revenue beyond subscriptions, it's concerning that the company lowered its estimate for its ad business," said analyst Ross Benes of Emarketer, Business Insider's sister company.

Heading into Q3 earnings, Netflix's stock was down over 44% in the last year as investors worried about engagement growth and stiff competition from YouTube and other free streamers.

Netflix said in its third-quarter shareholder letter that it knows "there's some investor concern about our view hours growth" but added that engagement "remains healthy."

"We do seek to accelerate growth in view hours as well, and we're confident we'll do that by relentlessly focusing and executing" its strategy, the shareholder letter said.

The company has invested in video games and podcasts but didn't mention either in its letter, outside a disclosure section on "forward-looking statements."

Netflix's results came less than a week after it shook up its content leadership team and cut about 1,000 workers.

Content chief Bela Bajaria is leaving her role after more than three years, Netflix announced last week. The company said Monday that film chief Dan Lin is also out.

Bajaria will be replaced by Peter Rice, a former Fox and Disney exec who ran Disney's TV division, including ABC and FX. Netflix hasn't yet said who will replace Lin; Rice will oversee film in the meantime.

"It's our goal to go from very good to great," co-CEO Greg Peters said of Netflix's content slate on the company's earnings call.

The leadership changes come as Netflix battles slowing viewership growth. The streaming powerhouse generated 97 billion viewing hours in the first half of the year, which was up 2% year-over-year.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at an industry event hosted by Bloomberg last month that Netflix was "not growing as fast as I want us to, and we're working on making that move faster."

"Revamping content strategy is not enough to fix this challenge, but it is a worthwhile start," Benes said.

Netflix layoffs were across its product, tech, HR, and legal teams. Co-CEOs Sarandos and Peters said in a memo to staffers that the company was downsizing so it can be "disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources."

Other media companies have laid off employees in the last month. NBCUniversal cut a few hundred global streaming tech employees in early October, and Disney trimmed its tech and HR teams in late September.

In the second quarter, Netflix's results were roughly in line with analysts' expectations. The stock sank 8% after the report as Netflix said it would cut back on how frequently it shared viewership data.

• AWS expected to get $5 billion of Nvidia GB300 racks, followed by $3 billion more each month.
• Some of these GPU systems are being stored elsewhere due to lack of data center power.
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees AI as a major opportunity, but getting capacity online is a challenge.

Amazon is racing to secure AI hardware earlier than before, even as data center power shortages leave some GPU systems waiting in warehouses.

Under a new Early Rack Receipt process, AWS expected to receive roughly $5 billion in Nvidia's GB300 server racks at US facilities before final deployment, according to August internal emails reviewed by Business Insider. The company projected roughly $3 billion more in GB300 racks each month "for the foreseeable future," one of the emails said.

Some AWS sites had room for more racks but not enough available power to turn them on, people familiar with the effort said, leaving finished equipment to be staged at intermediary warehouses until the facilities were ready.

At least one AWS team did not have "a clear forecasted path" for getting the incoming racks into data centers at the time, according to one of the emails.

Dark GPUs

A lack of new electricity capacity is one of several bottlenecks slowing the buildout of some AI data centers. This has led to a phenomenon known as dark GPUs, where AI chips and servers are purchased but can sit idle due to power supply issues or other challenges. (Dark GPUs can also refer to system design flaws that mean this gear isn't fully used after being plugged in).

This is partly why financial pressure is mounting on big data center projects. Money must be spent upfront to secure supplies of Nvidia GPUs and other valuable AI components. But if some data centers aren't ready to run, those early investments can tie up huge amounts of cash. Debt financing can fill in the gaps, but the market has become less willing to lend against some of these projects lately.

Trade-off

Amazon's early-rack program is one piece of the cloud leader's broader AI buildout, which is putting new pressure on its cash flow, as Business Insider exclusively reported this week. Amazon expects roughly $220 billion in capital expenditures this year — more than any Big Tech peer. Its free-cash-flow turned negative last quarter for the first time since 2023, and could stay negative for a while.

For AWS, the trade-off is securing scarce GPU racks before competitors do, even if some data centers are not yet ready to turn them on. But taking ownership earlier can tie up billions in equipment before it starts generating cloud revenue.

Previously, AWS took ownership of a finished rack only upon delivery to a data center, according to internal documents. Under the new approach, it can pay for and record certain racks earlier in the supply chain.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company routinely stages finished hardware near deployment sites so it can install it once capacity becomes available, calling the practice "best business practice." The spokesperson added that Amazon has long-established systems for tracking infrastructure assets and disputed that the broader company lacked a path for getting racks into data centers.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy previously said the company has a "clear line of sight" to strong returns from its AI investments, calling the technology a "once in a lifetime opportunity."

"We've been through this cycle with the first big AWS growth wave, and liked the results," Jassy wrote in Amazon's annual shareholder letter. "We expect to feel similarly about this next wave."

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• The Wall Street Journal has been planning a big streaming TV push with an ambitious slate of shows.
• It's explored shows around editor in chief Emma Tucker and creators like Feed Me's Emily Sundberg.
• Sundberg dropped out of talks a few weeks ago, Business Insider has learned.

The Wall Street Journal has been ramping up its push into video and had plans for an ambitious slate of streaming TV shows.

Internal documents viewed by Business Insider described an initial six-series offering that would include a flagship live morning program and an interview show hosted by the Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The docs are from the summer, and a person familiar with the Journal's strategy said that its plans, including dates and partners, are in flux.

The docs said the Journal had been "in negotiations" with creators such as Feed Me Substacker Emily Sundberg, as well as with the restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation. Sundberg dropped out of the talks a few weeks ago, Business Insider has learned.

The plans called for the shows to launch on the Journal's own channels, YouTube, and social media.

Journal parent company Dow Jones is also hiring a head of programming and content, who would be tasked with building "something ambitious in video." The live job description says the role will pay up to $330,000 in base salary, and involve developing talent that includes employees and external creators, translating the company's journalism into streaming formats, and creating live and on-demand shows.

The Journal and Dow Jones's effort shows how news outlets traditionally known for the written word — including The New York Times — are racing to beef up their video offerings in a media landscape that's seeing both the rise of social video and the decline of cable TV news. It also demonstrates that Tucker is taking a flexible approach to the market by looking to both build shows around in-house talent, including herself, and partner with creators and other media companies.

"Expanding our video presence across Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal is a major strategic priority, as we have widely communicated," a Dow Jones spokesperson said. "We are actively hiring leadership to shape and execute our go-to-market strategy for video across Dow Jones, and we look forward to sharing our updated plans when ready."

The Journal name-checked familiar figures

The internal docs viewed by Business Insider described the live morning show as a 60-minute-long anchor of the initial slate. The docs said the Journal enlisted some familiar names in morning news and video to help execute the show. They said the Journal has been working with the production company EverWonder, which was cofounded by the former Time Studios executive Ian Orefice with backing from Jeff Zucker's RedBird IMI.

Another show in the proposed slate in the docs was "The Exchange with Emma Tucker," which was billed as a "prestige interview franchise" that would put viewers "in the room with the people running the global economy." The documents name-checked top CEOs, including Microsoft's Satya Nadella, JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock's Larry Fink, as potential guests.

The person familiar with the Journal's strategy said the documents represented one of a number of different avenues the outlet was exploring and didn't reflect the current status and form of its efforts. The person said the company is in active conversations with a number of external people for potential partnerships.

The documents said the Journal had been "in negotiations" with Sundberg — which have since ended — for a show called "Feed Me, On Camera" that would introduce her "highly engaged, younger creator audience to WSJ while bringing WSJ's scale, authority, and affluent professional audience to her world." The docs envisioned each episode beginning with a "tip, obsession, or question from the Feed Me universe," and following Sundberg to its conclusion while integrating business context and reporting from the Journal.

Other shows the docs said the Journal had explored included one called "Market Price with The Infatuation" that would tackle the "business behind taste, literally." It would combine the cultural authority and young audience of The Infatuation, now owned by JPMorgan Chase, with the Journal's business reporting chops.

Another was "Inside Sports" ("title to change"), a "next generation reboot of 'Real Sports' for the sports-as-an-asset class era," potentially helmed by Emmy-winning TV journalist Armen Keteyian.

The documents said the Journal had been "in negotiations" with The Infatuation and "in discussions" with Keteyian. Business Insider could not confirm the status of those discussions.

The last series listed in the docs was an AI show that aimed to get a big-name host.

The Journal compared its plans to 'The Daily'

In the docs, the Journal expressed big ambitions for a live morning news show, and said there had been "nothing new" in the category for a professional audience "in a decade." The last entry on a timeline included in the planning docs was The New York Times' "The Daily" in 2017, which has become a reliable top show on the podcast charts and one of the paper's most successful launches.

"We see an opportunity to reinvent the category," the documents said. The Journal also has its own daily news podcast, called "The Journal."

Like the Times, the Journal is in a rare position in a challenged media environment to make a transformative investment. The Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., is profitable, helped by an early move to paywall its journalism.

The documents said that in its video push, the Journal aimed to produce 20 hours of video a week, expand to a free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel, and add subscription options and other formats as demand warranted. Between WSJ TV, existing video shows, licensed shows, and co-productions with creators, the Journal aspired to be an "always-on streaming channel." The person familiar with the Journal's strategy said those goals didn't represent its current plans.

Tucker took the helm at the Journal in 2023, moving from the Murdoch-owned UK Sunday Times with a plan to increase engagement with the Journal's digital products. Digital subscriptions rose 8% to 4.5 million in the three months ended June 30 versus the year-ago period. She has called for more lively writing and enterprise reporting. The Journal had already begun to reorient its video strategy under its former head of video Maral Usefi. Under Usefi, the video team had grown by a third, to 65 people, as of April. She was succeeded by Samantha Henig, who was hired in July to lead a new multimedia team.

The docs said that with the Journal's new effort, it aimed to combine its authority and scale with the personality of creator-led media and modern distribution. In terms of audience, it intended to reach a younger viewership than the traditional business TV audience and more decision-makers than creator-led media.

It projected reaching about 75 million viewers through Dow Jones' social reach, upward of 5.6 million monthly watch hours by its 2028 fiscal year, and ad rates that were three to five times what business content on YouTube commands. The person familiar with the Journal's strategy didn't say if those figures represented its current ambitions.

The Journal made a big push into original video more than a decade ago, including the launch of video app WSJ Live in 2011 and expanding to episodic video doc series. Publishers overall have newly reprioritized video amid the rise of short-form content, YouTube's increasing popularity on TV screens, and the success of new live shows like TBPN.

While embracing creator talent — and getting its own staff involved in video content — could help the Journal reach a younger audience, it comes with risks. Journalists who become on-camera talent can often command higher paydays, or defect to start their own ventures, like The New York Times' "Hard Fork" hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton did recently. Creators often have their own audiences, which give them leverage over a news organization that staff reporters might not have.

Flagship video shows are also expensive to produce, which makes high ad rates crucial to the Journal's success with this slate. The internal docs explored pitching a variety of ways for advertisers to get involved, including as launch partners, with category-exclusive partnerships, and as "moment partners" tied to major news events like elections, earnings, and WSJ specials.

• Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, is leaving, Meta confirmed to Business Insider.
• Kaplan, a Republican who once worked for the Bush administration, spent 15 years at Meta.
• Kaplan helped bridge ties between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Donald Trump.

A longtime political operative at Meta who played a key role in bridging ties between the company and President Donald Trump's administration is leaving.

Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, will leave after the midterm elections and a transition period, Axios first reported. Meta confirmed the report to Business Insider.

A veteran Marine Corps artillery officer, Kaplan is a Republican who served as an advisor and deputy chief of staff to former president George W. Bush.

Kaplan joined Meta in 2011. At Meta, he oversaw the company's response to policy issues ranging from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the end of its fact-checking program.

Kaplan helped repair a once-fraught relationship between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Trump after Meta temporarily suspended Trump's account following the January 6 riot.

Kaplan posted on X on Tuesday that he plans to spend time with his family and figure out what to do next.

Kaplan didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Kaplan has served as Meta's chief global affairs officer since 2025, succeeding former UK politician Nick Clegg. Other Meta executives will share his responsibilities, Axios reported.

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• Google is injecting more AI into the interview process.
• The company has been testing a new format that tests candidates on their AI fluency.
• The pilot has recently rolled out more broadly across Google, internal docs show.

AI is changing how Google employees work — and how Google hires them.

The company has been testing several AI-related changes to its hiring process for software engineers, according to documents reviewed by Business Insider. These changes, which Google has been rolling out in phases throughout this year, include allowing the use of AI in coding interviews and permitting interviewers to use Gemini to give candidates feedback.

Many engineers are also now expected to show some degree of AI fluency as a bare minimum, the documents show.

In May, Business Insider reported that Google was piloting ways to integrate AI into the interview process with a small handful of orgs. This included a new "code comprehension" interview in which candidates are assessed on AI fluency and prompt engineering. Candidates can also use Google's Gemini AI as an assistant during the interview.

The new formats have since been rolled out more broadly across the company, according to the internal documents. However, a spokesperson said they were still considered to be in the pilot phase for now.

"We're piloting updates to our interview process for software engineers, including evaluating for AI fluency, to be more reflective of how our teams are operating," Brian Ong, vice president of recruiting at Google, told Business Insider in a statement.

Like other companies, Google is adapting its hiring process to keep pace with the huge transformation AI is having on software engineering. As developers increasingly rely on AI coding assistants, hiring companies want to know how competent they are with these tools.

In April, Google said that three-quarters of new code created at the company is generated by AI and reviewed by humans, a trend that has since continued across the tech industry. Google has said that its employees are increasingly using the company's own Gemini models to both improve other Google products and to build the next generation of Gemini.

The documents say that for some roles, including software engineering, AI fluency and AI product integration are now used as measures of a candidate's abilities. A Google spokesperson said that AI fluency is a requirement for all software engineering jobs, while AI product integration is required for most roles outside entry-level positions.

Google is also piloting the use of Gemini for interview transcription and note-taking in some job interviews conducted via the company's videoconferencing platform, Google Meet, one document shows.

Google wants to speed up the feedback process using AI, too. The same document states that Google is working to enable interviewers to use Gemini to draft role-tailored feedback.

As Google builds out this new interview system, employees were told they may be asked to participate in some of the pilots — but were warned against using AI tools to generate their own interviewing "solutions."

"Do not use GenAI or LLMs to create your own standalone solutions or agents for hiring or interviewing use cases," the document states, referring to large language models.

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• Apple roiled the ad industry with an unexpected new crackdown on web trackers.
• The tech giant has now issued a rationale for why it's stamping out "identity resolution."
• The ad industry has concerns Apple's latest privacy move may hamper targeting and measurement.

Apple's latest privacy crackdown left the online ad industry scrambling for answers. Now, the tech giant has finally offered some.

Late on Monday, Apple published a blog post laying out its rationale for new restrictions that block technology used to identify and track consumers across websites. The changes are implemented through WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari and other browsers on iPhones and iPads.

Apple said the change was designed to target "identity resolution," a method adtech companies use to connect separate data points about users — such as email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, browsing history, or information about the device they're using — to identify and track them across devices.

The method grew in popularity as many web browsers, including Apple's Safari, began phasing out third-party tracking cookies, the small files dropped on a user's device that were traditionally used for web tracking. The ad industry deploys tracking to precisely target specific audiences and measure whether their campaigns are working.

In its blog post, Apple said that while users might readily offer their email address to log in to a website or sign up for a newsletter, most wouldn't expect it to also be shared with other companies for invisible tracking purposes.

"It's not enough to block cross-site cookies to prevent cross-site tracking today because the tracking industry has not stopped trying to track users on the web," Apple said. "They have ushered into what they call the post cookie era and in our latest releases we have put strong protection in place."

The blog post explains that Apple is implementing "domain-level" blocking, a broad intervention designed to ensure that identity providers can't circumvent the restriction by changing how they send data.

Apple took the adtech industry by surprise earlier this month when it came to light that it had begun blocking the domains operated by several companies that offer alternative identifiers, without warning. The blocked domains included those operated by The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5, Permutive, and Audigent.

The stakes are high for adtech companies that have invested heavily in building identity graphs and alternative tracking identifiers to mitigate the impact of the loss of third-party cookies. Apple's latest move threatens to undermine those efforts and put a dent in their businesses if targeting its users across the web becomes more difficult.

The initial rollout had also blocked The Trade Desk's ability to serve ads at all on Apple-operated browsers. Apple rolled out a fix a few days later that restored The Trade Desk's ad-serving domain from being blocked alongside its advertising identifier, Unified ID 2.0.

The ad industry braces for fallout

The ad industry is now bracing for impact as more users begin updating their devices to iOS 27. Ad pros previously told CMO Insider that the change will make it harder for advertisers to identify and reach people across the open web.

Industry insiders said that by effectively shrinking the pool of users they can target, advertisers are expecting less reach, higher prices to reach the audiences they can still identify, and more difficulty in controlling how often people see an ad and measuring whether their campaigns worked.

Identity resolution has become widespread across the open web. An academic paper published in September that analyzed 600,000 websites over 41 months found that 83.76% of those sites were using alternative identifiers by May 2025.

If advertising becomes less effective on the open web, marketers could funnel more of their budgets into so-called "walled garden" platforms like Meta and Google, which aren't as heavily reliant on alternative identifiers because they have reams of their own logged-in user data. Apple, too, has a growing advertising business within its App Store and apps, including News and Maps.

Apple isn't backing down

There are still unanswered questions about Apple's exact definition of an identity resolution provider, and the company has already demonstrated it can add domains to its block list without warning.

There's also an indication Apple is only getting started. First reported by AdExchanger, Apple has created a broader list that can dynamically block potentially hundreds of adtech, martech, and data companies. Affected companies may not realize they've been added to the list until they begin experiencing disruptions.

In Monday's blog post, Apple linked to its long-standing tracking-prevention policy, which acknowledges that its blocking rules may have unintended impacts. Those include disrupting the funding of websites that use targeted or personalized advertising, advertising measurement, and fraud prevention.

The policy states that while Apple will try to limit unintended impact, "when faced with a tradeoff, we will typically prioritize user benefits over preserving current website practices."

Ever since Apple launched its Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in 2017, the tech giant has been locked in a cat-and-mouse game with the adtech industry, which has persistently developed workarounds to its privacy updates. Adtech companies have argued that these techniques were necessary to help publishers effectively monetize their websites with ads while still maintaining user privacy.

Apple, which has long held that "privacy is a fundamental human right," makes it clear in its policy that it won't allow workarounds to proceed on its watch.

"We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as exploitation of security vulnerabilities," the Apple policy states. "If a party attempts to circumvent our tracking prevention methods, we may add additional restrictions without prior notice."