Verizon fires more Yahoo / AOL employees after a new revenue decline

Enlarge / A monitor seen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, September 4, 2018.

According to a CNN report, Verizon will fire another 150 employees of the Verizon Media division this week, which includes the subsidiaries of Yahoo and AOL.

“Around 10,500 people work at Verizon Media, so these cuts will make up 1.4 percent of the workforce. It is unclear which brands this will affect,” CNN wrote.

A Verizon spokesperson confirmed the redundancies, according to the CNN article. We contacted Verizon today and will update this article as we get more information.

The latest layoffs are less extensive than a major round of job losses in January 2019. At that time, Verizon fired around 800 people, or about seven percent of the 11,385 employees who were then employed by Verizon Media.

Verizon bought Yahoo for $ 4.48 billion in June 2017 and AOL for $ 4.4 billion in June 2015. But Verizon’s strategy of acquiring declining online media brands has not been successful in challenging Google and Facebook in the advertising market.

In December 2018, Verizon said in a file from the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had “experienced increased competition and market pressure in 2018 that led to lower-than-expected revenues and revenues,” and that “this pressure is expected to continue. ” Verizon registered a non-cash goodwill impairment of approximately $ 4.6 billion at the time, canceling out almost all the goodwill value of the Yahoo / AOL division.

In the third quarter of 2019, the most recent quarter, Verizon reported revenue in the media division of $ 1.8 billion, a two percent decrease on an annual basis. The two percent decrease was “an improvement in sales trends,” Verizon said. “Profits in native and mobile ads are still being offset by declines in desktop ads, although the company is moving forward in key areas.”

“We are migrating customers to our recently integrated native and demand-side advertising platforms with double-digit growth year after year,” said CFO Matt Ellis, Verizon, in a profit call on October 25. “For the first time we see mobile traffic increases outpace desktop traffic decreases in our core ownership and management products, including sports, finance, news, entertainment, home and mail.”

Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan said last month that, according to the CNN report, the company is focused on growing the division’s advertising, subscriptions, and e-commerce activities.

“Today we invest in premium content, connections and commercial experiences that connect people with their passions and continue to align our resources with opportunities that we think we can differentiate and scale up more quickly,” Verizon said in a statement about this week’s layoffs .

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