IndustryYahoo Reorg 2012: Search Avoids Death Sentence

Yahoo Reorg 2012: Search Avoids Death Sentence

Amidst a massive company restructuring, Yahoo search will live on. Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has unveiled his vision for turning around the struggling company. Yahoo will focus on three core “groups”: Consumer, Regions, and Technology.

yahoo-shadow-logoAmidst a massive company restructuring, Yahoo search will live on. After cutting 2,000 jobs last week, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has unveiled his vision for turning around the struggling company. Yahoo will focus on three core “groups”: Consumer, Regions, and Technology.

Yahoo’s Consumer Group

Yahoo search will live on in what is being called the “Connections” unit of the Consumer group, along with other communication and social properties. Senior VP Shashi Seth will lead this unit comprised of Yahoo properties including Mail, Messenger, Flickr, and Answers.

“The highest priority for Shashi and his team will be to think well beyond how users search, communicate and share online today,” Thompson wrote in an email to all Yahoos. “The Connections team is charged with fundamentally re-imagining how we design and deliver the next generation of these foundational Yahoo experiences.”

At last check, Yahoo employs roughly 1,800 staffers for search, Reuters reported, even though Bing powers the search results that appear on Yahoo.

Yahoo has seen its U.S. search market share fall in the past six months. Some preliminary comScore figures floating around yesterday appeared to show that Yahoo’s share dropped again in March to its lowest point ever – from 13.8 percent to 13.7 percent; that’s down from 16.1 percent in March 2011.

“Media” is the second unit comprising the Consumer group. This includes Yahoo’s homepage, News, Finance, Sports, and Entertainment.

The final member of the trio of units under the Consumer umbrella will be “Commerce,” which will be charged with driving higher ROI for advertisers and agencies. Autos, Shopping, Travel, Jobs, Personals, and Real Estate will live in this unit.

Yahoo’s Regions & Technology Groups

Regions is Yahoo’s group dedicated to advertisers and agencies in three regions: the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“Our regional sales teams will be the advocate and voice for our advertising customers: listening to them and driving their needs into the products we develop,” Thompson wrote. “Regional sales must bring urgency and tenacious sales execution to all we do for advertisers. In addition, these teams will leverage our unique and vast data resources to position Yahoo as the place to connect with users and generate the best, measurable ROI on their ad spend.”

Yahoo’s Technology group will house “core platforms” such as Analytics, CORE, Yahoo Labs, and data center and cloud infrastructure.

Thompson’s full email can be found at AllThingsD. The changes, announced yesterday, go into effect May 1.

Image Credit: superfluity/Flickr

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