Yahoo has laid off a number of its senior Australian executives, including Asia Pacific regional boss Paul Sigaloff.
The Australian axings are part of the 1,600 jobs that will be lost as part of Yahoo’s restructuring, announced to staff over the weekend.
The sackings make up 20 per cent of the company’s global workforce, and come as the company aims to simplify its advertising structure, bringing it under one offering, named Yahoo Advertising.
“Over several years, the strategy of our ads business was to compete in the ad tech industry by offering a ‘unified stack’ consisting of our Demand Side Platform (DSP), Supply Side Platform (SSP) and Native platforms,” a Yahoo spokesperson said.
“Despite many years of effort and investment, this strategy was not profitable and struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack.”
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios the layoffs are not due to financial challenges but “strategic changes to the company’s Yahoo for Business advertising unit, which is not profitable.”
Lanzone said the changes will be “tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall.”
“A lot of resources were going into that unified stack without a return,” Lanzone explained of the previous advertising strucuture.
“This was a longstanding issue with every variation of this company that needed to be solved eventually.”
