Yahoo! Layoff Talk

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 19, 7:44AM EDT · Published Jul 19, 6:41AM EDT

Speculation has grown that the only effective way for Yahoo!’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) new CEO to improve the company’s prospects on Wall St. is to make another large round of employee cuts. In many analysts’ opinions, the portal company still has too many people. The Wall Street Journal made this analysis:

Excluding contractors, 2011 revenue per average employee was $1.4 million at Facebook and $1 million at Google. At Yahoo, it was $316,000.

Because Yahoo!’s revenue problems may take years to solve, even with the engineering and product skills of chief executive Marissa Mayer, she has very few ways to impress investors short term. Among these would be a sale of either Yahoo!’s position in China e-commerce firm Alibaba or in the U.S. company’s shares in Yahoo! Japan. Neither alters the fact that Yahoo!’s core advertising business is in trouble. The temptation to balance that may well be through another round of firings — something that most of Mayer’s predecessors have done already.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.