Yahoo, one of the pioneering internet companies, has said that it is laying off 20 per cent of its workforce, or 1,600 employees.
According to the company, 12 per cent of the workforce (around 1,000 employees) would be laid off on Friday, followed by another 8 per cent (600 people) in the next six months.
Yahoo
These job cuts will impact around half of Yahoo’s ad tech business.
Will make Yahoo profitable
In an interaction with Axios, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that these changes will be “tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall”.
The layoffs will help the company “to go on offense” and invest more in profitable businesses.
“Yahoo will shut down a part of its advertising business called its SSP, or supply-side platform, which helps digital publishers sell automated ads against their content,” according to the report.
Yahoo’s failing ad business
The company will also shut down its native advertising platform called Gemini.
Unsplash
It will leverage its newly-formed partnership with ad tech giant Taboola to sell native advertising.
Growing list of companies cutting jobs
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 in a statement.
Yahoo joins a growing list of tech companies, including Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney and more which have laid off thousands of employees in recent months.
AFP
While companies worldwide have announced layoffs, most job cuts are in US-based companies.
This includes both Americans and foreign nationals who were in the country on H1-B visas.
Petition seeking H1-B visa grace period extension
The layoffs have become a double blow to H1-B visa holders, including Indians, as they are now without a job and also face the threat of being forced to leave the US.
As per the rules, an H1-B visa holder can remain in the US for only sixty days from the termination of the job.
With time running out for a large section of the laid-off immigrants, two Indian-American organisations have launched an online petition urging President Joe Biden to extend the grace period of H-1B visa holders from two months to a year.
REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGE
“On behalf of immigrants (from the world, mainly from India and China) as well as naturalised citizens like Indian-Americans, Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies and Global Technology Professionals Association (GITPRO) has submitted an appeal to the President of the United States, the Secretary of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the director of USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) to extend the current grace period from 60 days to 1 year (minimum 6 months),” the online petition said.
“We join the appeal and request to sympathetically consider the impact of the families on humanitarian grounds. We believe that this extension will pause this brain drain and ensure that the US will continue to be a world leader in technology and innovation. We also request elected officials to support this extension and if needed introduce a bill in the House of Representatives,” said the online petition.
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