Yahoo announced on Wednesday it was be laying off 2,000 workers as the new CEO tries to turn around the company in a broad restructuring of the often-troubled Web company. The layoffs amount to over 14% of the entire Yahoo workforce. This is the deepest cuts the 18-year old company has had and shows how serious CEO Scott Thompson is about revamping the online business.
Even though Yahoo has maintained a huge audience on the Internet, it has continually lost ground to competitors like Google and Facebook in the war for the almighty advertising dollar.
Thompson came to the company from PayPal, where he ran the online payment company. He told Yahoo employees via an email that Yahoo would be concentrating on is content and media services and in the data generated from the estimated 700 million people who use its websites every month.
Thompson is relying on the idea Yahoo will be able to sell more advertising by drilling into the personal information that is collected from all the millions of users. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California still has some of the most popular sports, finance and news sites on the Web.
Economists also believe that Thompson will sell off some of the company’s businesses including advertising and search technology platforms. That could result in the company needing to make additional layoffs they said. On April 17, Thompson said he would reveal more details about the company restructuring when Yahoo announces its financial results for the first quarter.
