Image credit: Source: Catena Media company statement. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
Catena Media has cut five more roles in its technology, marketing and regional sites teams, the affiliate group confirmed this week, redistributing the regional sites team's work across the rest of the business. The company said it is providing direct support to the employees affected and framed the move as continuing its strategy to focus on core products while streamlining operations.
Five roles is small next to Catena's last major cut: roughly 50 people, about a quarter of headcount, let go in the second quarter of 2025 as part of a restructuring expected to save between EUR4.5 million and EUR5 million a year. That round also removed an entire layer of management under new leadership and pushed the company toward what it called a simpler, more agile operating model. Q1 2026 personnel expenses were already down 18% year on year before this latest cut.
The timing is the interesting part. Catena's own Q1 2026 report showed the company returning to double-digit growth, revenue from continuing operations up 26% to EUR12.3 million and adjusted EBITDA up 191% to EUR2.7 million, the fastest growth rate among the major listed affiliates. A company posting numbers like that is not cutting jobs because the business is shrinking. It is cutting jobs because the growth it found came from a leaner cost base, not from adding headcount back, the same pattern showing up across the sector as Google's algorithm changes and AI Overviews keep rewriting how affiliate SEO earns a click.
That reframes what "recovery" means for an affiliate business in 2026. Catena's completed strategic review split the sector into operators betting on focus and operators betting on scale, and this week's cut shows the focus bet does not stop paying a cost in jobs even after the revenue line turns positive. Regional sites, the smaller, geography-specific properties that used to be a volume play for affiliates chasing every long-tail search term, are exactly the kind of asset that stops paying for itself once a single algorithm update can erase a page's ranking overnight.
Rivals are answering the same pressure differently. Gambling.com Group renamed itself Grandstand in July partly to widen who is willing to do business with an affiliate carrying a gambling-branded name, a marketing and structural fix rather than a cost fix. Catena's answer, five rounds of cuts in roughly two years by outside counts, is the opposite bet: shrink the fixed cost base until the SEO traffic that remains is profitable on its own terms.
The recovery is a margin story, not a jobs story
Investors reading Catena's Q1 numbers alongside this week's layoffs get a consistent signal, not a contradictory one. The stock-friendly version of an affiliate turnaround right now looks like flat or falling headcount next to rising EBITDA, and any operator or investor judging affiliate health off revenue growth alone is missing half of what actually recovered.