Bay Area tech fixture Yahoo to lay off 20% of staff, cut ad team by half

Longtime Bay Area tech conglomerate Yahoo is cutting 20% of its workforce by the end of the year — including about 1,000 employees this week alone — according to a Thursday report from Axios. The company, which is owned by private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, will reportedly shut down parts of its ad tech business, representing the first 1,000 workers cut. The final 8% of layoffs will happen by the end of 2023, according to Axios. Yahoo has attempted for years to compete with search and ad tech giants like Google and Meta with its own unified ad platform, but is admitting defeat with the reported changes. The company plans to keep its demand-side platform, which helps advertisers buy ads, but shut down its ad sales operation. Yahoo will now partner with Taboola to sell ads on its own properties. More than 50% of the Yahoo ad tech unit’s current staff are slated to lose their jobs. “The moves are meant to simplify and strengthen the good parts of the business, while sunsetting the rest,” CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios. A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment and details on employee severance packages. It’s also unclear how many of the impacted employees are based in the Bay Area. Yahoo sold off its Sunnyvale headquarters in 2019 to Google and sold off another large chunk of space in San Jose to TikTok parent company ByteDance, but still maintains a large office in SoMa.