How much media and tech giants from Disney to TikTok pay employees in the US

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How much media and tech giants from Disney to TikTok pay employees in the US
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
  • Streaming has merged media with technology, leading companies like Disney and TikTok to compete for talent.
  • Insider analyzed US pay data to see what nine media giants offer employees.
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Streaming has fused media with technology, urging media companies to think like tech platforms and tech giants to move into content.

The result is a massive shift in media and tech workforces. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others have staffed up in tech and consumer-facing roles as they focus on their direct-to-consumer businesses. And tech companies like TikTok have made key hires from more traditional media spheres.

With media and tech heavyweights increasingly vying for top talent, Insider analyzed recent pay data to see how much the major players in the space offered top talent.

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The data, released by the US Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification, shows how much companies offered to pay employees who they wanted to hire through work visas in the US.

We looked at pay data, mainly from October 1, 2020 through September 30, 2022, across nine companies including Hulu; Netflix; The New York Times; Roku; Snapchat owner Snap; TikTok and its parent company, Bytedance; Twitch, Amazon's livestreaming platform; and Warner Bros. Discovery.

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(We've also looked at salaries across industries that are transforming media, including the creator economy and US sports betting.)

These are base salaries, and do not include other forms of compensation such as stock options or cash bonuses.

Disney

Disney and its US streamer Hulu have offered base salaries ranging from $93,150 to $242,000 per year, according to wages from 140 foreign-labor-certification applications from October 2020 to June 2022.

Most of the salaries were for streaming and tech jobs, including data scientist and software engineer roles. There were also salaries for a handful of other roles, such as a marketing analyst at Hulu and a project manager at Walt Disney Attractions Technology.

Read our full breakdown of how much employees at Disney and Hulu make.

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Netflix

Streaming giant Netflix has offered base salaries ranging from $40.45 per hour to $800,000 per year for certain US roles, according to wages from 542 foreign-labor-certification applications.

They included content, finance, legal, marketing, product, and other roles, many of which offered six-figure base salaries.

Netflix's workforce boomed in recent years as the company staffed up to support its growing content endeavors and, more recently, its push into gaming.

But the streamer also recently laid off staffers in marketing, animation, and other divisions amid internal restructurings and subscriber-growth struggles that have raised questions about the company's growth plans. Still, Netflix's expansion into advertising, among other areas, could help create new jobs.

Read our full breakdown of how much Netflix employees make.

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The New York Times

The New York Times has offered base salaries ranging from $53,392 to $306,000 per year for certain US roles, according to wages from 105 foreign-labor-certification applications from October 2019 to June 2022.

The salaries were from jobs in the paper's newsroom and other divisions such as advertising, data, and engineering. Many of the positions were based in New York, though some were based in California, North Carolina, and Texas.

The Times has been in growth mode lately, buying up new properties like sports site The Athletic and hit game Wordle as it seeks to boost its subscription offering to readers across the world and introduce more ways to monetize its journalism. The paper's news division also expanded by hundreds in the last few years and employs about 1,700 journalists.

Read our full breakdown of how much New York Times employees make.

Roku

Roku, a leader in US streaming devices and platforms, has offered base salaries ranging from $75,000 to $687,500 per year for certain US roles, according to wages from 175 foreign-labor-certification applications from October 2020 to December 2021.

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The salaries were mainly for product, engineering, and other tech roles. Most of the jobs were based in California, but there were also positions based in other US states including New York, Massachusetts, and Texas.

The early days of the pandemic fueled a period of growth for Roku, helping to accelerate its transition from a small-but-mighty maker of streaming-TV boxes into a video platform business that makes most of its revenue through advertising.

The company has hit speed bumps since. Its growth has slowed, as have other streaming businesses. And its former platform boss Scott Rosenberg, who led Roku's push to sell advertising, left the company in the spring.

But Roku hasn't shown signs of pulling back on its investment into original content, and has continued to staff up recently to support its growth plans such as its smart-home ambitions.

Read our full breakdown of how much Roku employees make.

Snap

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has offered base salaries ranging from $50,315 to $500,000 per year for various US roles — and even $1.95 million for one, according to wages from 303 foreign-labor-certification applications from October 2020 to December 2021.

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The salaries were mainly for data, engineering, and product jobs, as well as some marketing and other positions. The jobs were based in Santa Monica, Seattle, Silicon Valley's Mountain View, San Francisco, or New York.

Snap has staffed up heavily in recent years. But it's since cut its workforce dramatically amid the economic uncertainty.

Snap told employees in May that while it still planned to grow its headcount by about 10% this year, hiring for new roles would slow substantially. Then, in August, Snap slashed its workforce by about 20% in a mass layoff that impacted nearly every part of the business, including areas that remain strategic priorities for the company such as augmented reality.

Read our full breakdown of how much Snap employees make.

Spotify

The music-streaming company Spotify has offered base salaries ranging from $75,000 to $369,500 per year for certain US roles, according to wages from 414 foreign-labor-certification applications.

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The vast majority of the salaries were for roles based in New York and Boston, though Spotify now allows staffers to "work from anywhere." The jobs included a mix of advertising, research, product, and administrative roles.

In June, the company told staff it would slow the pace of hiring by 25% to prepare for a potential economic slowdown. The streamer also laid off some podcast employees in October as it canceled some of its original shows.

But, as of November, Spotify still had 115 open positions listed on its jobs board, including 56 available to US-based staffers or remote workers in the Americas. The listings included openings for engineers, sales staff, data scientists, and marketing specialists.

Read our full breakdown of how much Spotify employees make.

TikTok

The short-video app TikTok and its parent company Bytedance have offered base salaries ranging from $29 an hour to $438,000 per year for US certain roles, according to wages from 1,135 foreign-labor-certification applications.

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Many of the salaries were for roles based in the companies' Mountain View, California offices.

The ByteDance salaries included jobs that focus on corporate-support functions like finance that could apply to any division or product within the company. And the TikTok salaries were for TikTok-specific positions in areas like product development and growth marketing.

TikTok emerged in recent years as a major player in tech and media. Its user base exploded in 2021, passing one billion monthly active users globally, according to the company.

The mounting political pressure against TikTok — its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, which has raised concerns about user data privacy on the app — hasn't yet dampened the short-video platform's popularity in the US.

Read our full breakdown of how much TikTok employees make.

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Twitch

Twitch, Amazon's livestreaming giant, has offered base salaries ranging from $60,174 and $201,968 per year for certain US roles, according to wages from 84 foreign-labor-certification applications from October 2020 to December 2021.

Most of the salaries were for data, engineering, and other tech jobs based in San Francisco, California; and Seattle, Washington.

Internally, a 2022 Bloomberg report found high turnover among Twitch's workforce. Six C-Suite executives – and a total of 60 employees – had left the company this year through March, including Twitch's COO, chief content officer, and head of creator development, per Bloomberg. Twitch's SVP of global creators also resigned in September, on the same day that the company announced changes to the way it pays top creators that sparked backlash among the streaming community.

But Amazon-owned Twitch is still the largest platform in the game streaming space by a longshot.

In October, Twitch clocked 1.79 billion hours of watch time, per analytics firm Rainmaker.gg. By comparison, Facebook Gaming clocked 342 million hours of watch time that month.

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Twitch also appears to be hiring for dozens of open roles listed on its jobs board.

Read our full breakdown of how much Twitch employees make.

Warner Bros. Discovery

Discovery and WarnerMedia, which merged this year to create Warner Bros. Discovery, have each offered base salaries as high as $300,000 per year for various US roles, based on work-visa applications submitted by both companies.

The data included 163 salaries at the legacy WarnerMedia entities and 156 salaries at Discovery.

The WarnerMedia salaries ranged from $55 per hour to $300,000 per year, and were mostly for jobs at HBO, though the data also included salaries from from other parts of the company.

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The Discovery salaries ranged from $52,333 to $300,000, and included a mix of business intelligence, data, software engineering, and other roles with pay rates similar to those at WarnerMedia.

The union of WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. created a company of formidable size, with about 30,000 employees at the parent of Warner Bros. and more than 10,000 at the conglomerate that houses cable stalwarts HGTV, the Food Network, and TLC.

The dust is still settling on the merger, and corporate consolidation almost always brings "synergies" (read: widespread job cuts, which have already hit teams including US ad sales, CNN, and more) as leadership strategizes to trim the fat.

But for now, both parts of the new whole continue to enlist more staffers: There were in December more than 900 online job listings at Warner Bros. Discovery globally, including nearly 500 in the US.

Read our full breakdown of how much Warner Bros. Discovery employees make.

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