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Yahoo! Businesses

Yahoo To Lay Off More Than 20% of Staff 63

Posted by BeauHD from the cuts-keep-coming dept.
Yahoo plans to lay off more than 20% of its total workforce as part of a major restructuring of its ad tech unit, executives told Axios. The cuts will impact more than 50% of Yahoo's ad tech employees -- more than 1,600 people. Axios reports: In an interview, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone stressed that the layoffs are not attributable to financial challenges, but rather, strategic changes to the company's Yahoo for Business advertising unit, which is not profitable. These changes will be "tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall," he said, which will allow the company "to go on offense" and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable. Yahoo as a whole is profitable and brings in roughly $8 billion in annual revenue, Axios has reported.

Roughly 1,000 positions will be eliminated Thursday, representing 12% of the total planned cuts at Yahoo. The remaining 8% or more of cuts will occur in the second half of this year. Lanzone said he couldn't provide the exact number of future cuts, but confirmed that the total number of layoffs would amount to more than 50% of the ad tech unit's current staff, and more than 20% of Yahoo's current staff.

As part of the changes, Yahoo will shut down a part of its advertising business called its SSP, or supply-side platform, which helps digital publishers sell automated ads against their content. It will also shut down its native advertising platform, called Gemini, and instead will leverage its newly-formed partnership with ad tech giant Taboola to sell native advertising on its own content instead. By moving to Taboola, Yahoo will be able to increase the number of advertisers competing for ad placements on Yahoo properties by 8x, Lanzone said. The company is opting to shut down the SSP business instead of selling it, in part because it didn't want to be locked into a post-sale agreement where it would be forced to use its SSP exclusively, Lanzone said. Working with many different SSPs will help Yahoo optimize its ad revenue.
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Yahoo To Lay Off More Than 20% of Staff More

Yahoo To Lay Off More Than 20% of Staff

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  • Heartbreaking! (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:25PM (#63280341)

    I hope all five people are able to find new employment quickly.

  • Yahoo is still around? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChrisKnight ( 16039 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:25PM (#63280343) Homepage

    Well, that's a surprise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Was my first reaction as well. They have been irrelevant for a long, long time now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      i have a very old but still active throwaway mail account with yahoo. other than that, i'm very puzzled how this company even exists today. wiki tells me they have over 8000 employees (today). i can't fathom what those people are supposed to be working on/for.

      • I'm glad it works for you.
        I ditched it more than a decade ago, after a series of occurrences where e-mails from various senders never reached my Yahoo inbox. I am not talking about "SPAM filter caught them by mistake", they simply never arrived, they disappeared on the way.
        The issue could be mostly replicated (I say "mostly" because every now and then, one of those e-mails did come through, but they usually didn't).
        It's not nice at all when you expect an invoice and it never arrives, or you create an accoun

    • Re:Yahoo is still around? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jma05 ( 897351 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @08:55PM (#63280633)

      I still use Yahoo email, from since 90s.
      I don't use GMail since it is creepy to give more info to a company actively interested in collecting data about you in every way. I stopped using GMail when it acquired Double Click.
      By contrast Yahoo email is just plain old email. I still use their classic UI.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by Known Nutter ( 988758 )
        Ok grandpa, let's get you back to bed.
      • Allegedly google stopped data mining people's email accounts a few years ago (and if anyone actually believe that, I have a bridge to sell you ;))
      • My sister-in-law still has a yahoo.com email address. Of course, I still have a hotmail.com email address, but at least I got rid of my aol.com one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Sure, Yahoo doesn't have basically the exact same business model as Google. They're definitely not reading your email that you don't pay for.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

        I don't use GMail since it is creepy to give more info to a company actively interested in collecting data about you in every way.

        Errr. Because Yahoo wasn't a search engine that made all of its money by providing your information to advertisement? Or Yahoo wasn't purchased by the company Verizon who were known and criticised widely as not only hoovering private data up, but actually selling their databases wholesale with virtually no anonymity to whomever showed up with a credit card.

        I have both Yahoo and Gmail. If I had any concern about privacy and was told I need to keep one of them I sure as heck wouldn't keep Yahoo.

    • Well, that's a surprise.

      Hey, they perform an essential service.

      Where the hell am I going to find new coasters?!?

    • Believe it or not they're big in Japan. Any anime community as well as the retro game collecting community Yahoo auctions are a huge thing.

      If I remember right they had bought a stake in one of the companies that took off like crazy, I think Alibaba. But a complicated series of legal maneuvers meant that the smaller investors got screwed on that.

  • Yahoo To Lay Off More Than 20% of Staff

    So they let 3 blokes go.

  • WTF is Yahoo? (Score:4, Funny)

    by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:29PM (#63280363)

    I tried Googling Yahoo but all I got were pictures of was Margery Taylor Greene screaming like some kind of crackhead at the subway station

  • Real people here (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OffTheLip ( 636691 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:32PM (#63280373)
    I agree with the jokes about Yahoo but there could be pain ahead for these employees. It sucks but then not surprising.

    • I agree with the jokes about Yahoo but there could be pain ahead for these employees. It sucks but then not surprising.

      It is the general risk of working in the Tech Sector.

      While overall a tech job is one of the few Middle Class jobs you can get that you don't need to be a manager, have a a good degree of autonomy, and control of your career. You do risk becoming obsolete, or working for a company which was once one of the bright spots, to become a lagging fossil of a company.

      If you are a tech worker outside the Tech industry, then you are still at risk, because you are often working what is classified as a cost center. Wh

  • Yahoo had a big head start in many areas: search, blogs, e-commerce, email, etc. The world was their oyster, but they killed the oyster by feeding it wrong.

    According to Paul Graham, it was because they hired traditional managers at the top who didn't understand the needs of a startup. They micromanaged developers and were risk aversive.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

      Yahoo had a big head start in many areas: search, blogs, e-commerce, email, etc. The world was their oyster, but they killed the oyster by feeding it wrong.

      A big part of their problem was the assumption that people wanted a curated content aggregator set as their homepage, and their entire business model kind of revolved around that assumption. Turned out that what the unwashed masses really wanted was feeds full of crap shared by their family, friends, and celebrities. Yahoo missed the social media bandwagon big time.

  • Tomato, tomah-to (Score:3)

    by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:37PM (#63280401)
    "Not due to financial challenges." It's just to make things "more profitable". But, just to be clear, profitability is in no way a challenge. It's just they need "more" of it. Mmmmkay?
    • Every publicly traded company is doing layoffs within weeks of eachother. Most of them aren't lacking in profit margin, they just want *more* profit margin because investors are bailing on companies with margins that aren't insane.

      • Every publicly traded company is doing layoffs within weeks of eachother. Most of them aren't lacking in profit margin, they just want *more* profit margin because investors are bailing on companies with margins that aren't insane.

        Here ya go. This is why [imgur.com].

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Yeah, it goes to show precisely how bad their leadership is.

      "Hey, we have some outdated technology because we didn't bother to try to keep up and not much else to commend us. We only have some residual brand recognition left in our brand, what should we do? Drop our vaguely valuable brand to make sure we piss away the only value we could have possibly pointed to."

  • Thatâ(TM)s the future. Thatâ(TM)s where the jobs are at. Likely at the rate things are going that such as Silicon Valley will become another rust belt.

    • It was the future, that future came and went, then it came back again, and now it is leaving...

      I agree that Silicon Valley may become the next rust belt, But not because of a long term loss of demand for Computer Science work, but the need to have tech workers so centralized in one area, isn't such a thing anymore.

      I live in an area that is technically considered part of the existing rust belt, seeing the affect on the community actually makes me very weary about when municipalities do big tax breaks to att

      • It was the future, that future came and went, then it came back again, and now it is leaving...

        Didn't I see that exact scene in Spaceballs? I guess life DOES imitate art.

  • But I gotta say... I'm surprised to hear there was actually anyone left at Yahoo! nowadays.

  • I am SHOCKED! (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @09:00PM (#63280649)
    Yahoo! still has staff?!?

  • This was totally expected, with all this insane inflation (which is much higher than 15% even), the prices are rising, people have less money for discretionary spending The less that money buys, the less stuff can be bought, so there is no reason for as much advertising spending as was customary. That is why Google, FB and Yahoo and other advertising platforms are cutting staff and will cut much more than this.

  • I haven't been there in years.
    I really wished they worked on their search algorithm to compete with Google.
    Because now I am getting tired of Google's algorithm.
    Advanced search functionality gone.
    Ads over search results.

  • Haven't found a reason to switch to other finance websites; mostly just need a stock graph, stock stats and you get relevant news articles to any stock you look up.
  • Thereyago, I was a yahoo email customer for 20 years, but then they decided to sell our information, so I left. Not only that I had to stop payment on my financial account to do it.

  • "We secondary email address people use to sign up for porn sites!" - Consuela

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