Technorati just announced on its official blog that the company has decided to lay off six employees as the result of generally poor economic conditions. Management is also taking a 10-15% pay cut, while all other surviving employees are getting their paychecks cut down by 10%.
Two of the six departures are from management positions, although no names have been released yet.
CEO Richard Jalichandra described those who have been laid off as “high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now. They’re also friends, and we’re very sad to see them go. We simply need a leaner and reconfigured mix to get us through 2009.”
The layoffs come just over a month after Technorati acquired ad network AdEngage for an undisclosed amount.
Technorati is now listed on our Layoff Tracker, which we continue to update with all the most recent layoffs in the tech industry.
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“high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now…”
Yeh right! Can you ask the joker CEO then why the heck did he lay them off?
your kiddin me
lay off your best performers/friends - for a leaner reconfig mix?
i think they let the wrong people go and they should have started from the top with the half-azz hot air pushers.
WorkLocator.com
“high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now.”
I really hate this. It’s a bunch of crap. What you really meant was the Highest Paid!! Obviously, if they were there the longest, that means they have also increased in salary over the years.
I tell you all again, any start-up, or any tech company that lays off during these economic times will be doomed to more failure. Companies should be going lean, but not cutting there people. They need to be Innovating, dropping their prices for their products & services & building relationships with their customers.
It’s a smart move on their part to proactively keep burn rates as low as possible. Long tail media networks for bloggers like Technorati and http://www.Bloggerandpodcaster.net are the future, but we’ve all got to navigate the short term first.
way to plug your stupid website. you should fire yourself while you’re at it.
Best of luck to those got let you!
Regards
Raise your hand if you think Technorati is still relevant.
looks around waiting for hands
Still waiting… No hands.
Oops. Meant that they are/still relevant… lol.
More than EVER before.
Actually if there was a company that I wish to be publicly traded it’d be this one! VERY BULLISH.
Remember, almost the same thing happened at IGN in 02 after the last recession and it came back huge! Like over 500m acquisition huge. The team at Technorati is made up of a lot of IGN’s key components (i.e. RJ)!
With Six Apart and Federated both in what I would consider to be a much worse predicament, Technorati stands to gain in this recession.
Batten down the hatches guys! You’ll come out on the other end looking pretty clean!
Technorati is irrelavant at this times. Jumpin’ Jehosephat, my hands are down.
How many CEOs are really “friends” with their employees? As Roseanne Barr once put it, the whole point of business is to keep your friends working. So if you want to see who his friends really are, look to people who still have a job.
always tough to see companies laying off employees, especially just before Thanksgiving. who knows, maybe these guys will start a new company that ends up being better than technorati
they were already making shit money, because the last time this happened the oh so smart said people shouldn’t make that kind of money so limit the salaries and implement Sarbanes Oxley and this will never happen again, sooo everyone excepted smaller salaries to make the company lean and mean.
You produce more with less and we will sell the company for $100 million and give you .3% equity
Well another MBA theory shot to shit. It takes money to make money. Tell the VC to pony up what it takes…
add them to the deadpool
lol
I agree with Patrick… you never know who can make best future product.
http://www.oxyshopping.com
btw, heard that yahoo started their layoffs in europe this week. any news about that?
The CEO is smart and is friends with the employees so what is wrong with that?
Smart. Good move…
Interesting that they quote ComScore numbers when they have Quantcast “Quantified” directly measured stats available.
It is a shame that more sites don’t use Quantcast so we can look at real numbers.
I recently nudged Tony at Blogcatalog that it might be interesting to get Blogcatalog quantified.
http://www.quantcast.com/profi.....norati.com
Technorati seem to be a lot shy of 12m US uniques directly measured via Quantcast and it is nice to see BC isn’t being dwarfed.
Hey Andy,
If it was not clear from the post, Richard is referring to the growth of our ad network. Technorati Media as defined in comScore reaches 12.5 million US uniques - this includes some, but not all, of the blogs that are part of our network. Google analytics shows closer to 55 million
We are in the process of Quantifying all of the sites that are part of Technorati Media - for the exact reason you mention - far more accurate than panels especially as you move down the tail.
Quantcast shows Technorati.com at 3.3 million US / 10.6 global unique visitors.
Hi Jen
It certainly was a little unclear if that was what was meant.
It was a seperate sentence, specifically about “top 5 blog properties”
I certainly wouldn’t look on the reach of Technorati Media as something related to their ranking as a “blog property”.
Thanks for clearing up the confusion
Richard took a $500k signing bonus to take this job. Perhaps he should look at and provide a critic of the decisions he made and not blame layoffs on the “economy”. That 500k could keep these people employed.
Wait, Andy, since when did a blog ad network, search portal and self-service ad platform specifically for bloggers not count as a ‘top blog property?’
Do you think the traffic numbers for Google or Yahoo properties should be inflated by the numbers of advertising impressions they have on other sites?
You wouldn’t really want widget displays to be mixed in with the traffic trends of Blogcatalog, Mybloglog, Friendfeed, Sezwho, Intense Debate, Disqus, JSKit and a host of others… that is a different stat about their reach and distribution, possibly relevant in some cases but certainly something that is best with a seperate analysis.
Doesn’t seem like they’re mixing widget displays into their numbers…and you seem to be missing the point on what a web property is.
Unionize! Strike against the pay cut! At a time when inflation is high this pay cut is even larger! For automatic pay increases with inflation - for a sliding scale of wages! If they say there is no money demand that they open the books! If there truely is no money then demand nationalization without compensation for the shareholders!
Technorati does not have any good ads on their site. Why are they not using google adsense as their partners which can bring them a lot more revenue. They should also sell branded banner-text ads to businesses on a monthly fee basis like the newspapers do. no cpc, no cpm just cpp - cost for placement. The money will roll in
Tom, it is definitely hard to understand what you mean by absence of good ads as ads served by Technorati on their own sites and on sites in their ad network Technorati Media (I know as I run one of the blogs in the network) depend very much on where you personally are but to US users they invariably serve banners from premium brands and even outside of the US they work with some important brands. Many of the blogs in the network have Adsense as default banners for when there is no banner from an advertiser in the network and I can tell you that even trying to compare revenue from AdSense to that generated by CPM advertisers is nonsense as AdSense pays virtually nothing.
Honestly, if Technorati is irrelevant, then why do they get so much media coverage when they layoff 6 people?!
Seriously, most companies can sneeze and layoff dozens of their work force without making the radar, or having anyone even care for that matter. Meanwhile Technorati, which many of you bash, lays off a small few and Techcrunch and CNET write about…
Seriously. If this company is so “irrelevant,” then why so much attention?
Do people dislike Technorati because they are democratic in how they index content and only the bloggers with audience get eyeballs? Is that what this is about? All of you “can’t,” so you bash?
I really don’t understand. I love Technorati. They make something that is truly fragmented, search-able. Plus, they’re much better than anyone else at doing this. Why hate?
Technorati is not relevant because they are a mess. They ping sites they “track” at completely random frequencies and often forget about them until their bloggers ping them a bunch of times. Their ranking system is garbage. Their numbers are inflated into the stratosphere by dead blogs they won’t pull from their rolls. Their assessments of the state of the blogosphere are a joke. Their ad network sucks donkey balls. What more do you need? They are irrelevant.
I don’t care if they’re relevant or not, but I wish to god at least one silly valley ceo would cut the BS when announcing layoffs. Seriously, how hard is it to say: “We’re not making enough money to pay everyone, sorry.”
Instead, we get a bunch of hubris about the economy sucking (yes, it is, but that’s not entirely responsible for your predicament), how great these employees are (FYI, great employees have an ROI that is a multiple of their salary, so these people may be nie, but that doesn’tmean they’re great), and what a bright future the company still has (riiight…because you’ve got EYEBALLS? That’s a benchmark that shoulda been tossed out with the first bust).
although surviving in this economic environment is no picnic for anybody, im glad to see technorati explore the happy medium of cutting salaries instead of letting even more people go. im surprised more companies aren’t taking similar measures to retain what would otherwise be good people leaving their company.
boris
http://www.thewebwar.com
I remember meeting with some high up there for lunch 3 years ago, and asked him (being the turd in the punchbowl that I am) if the runup in the new .com ‘web 2.0′ blah blah blah sites would lead to .bomb 2.0
He was a little pissed at me for bringing that up. My timing is always off by a couple years.
I have this wierd idea of seeking ideas & democratic feedback from people/employees during the tough times…the tool can be employed by CEO’s to really defend the company’s interest without cutting on talent in a merciless way…or with some shitty MBA theory behind it.
You may find a group of employees who will be ready to work for free for these times….so why is there a need to axe people?
See my product called YouSuggest on website: http://www.latticepurple.com … I do not want to spam this place with advertisement of my company or the product… So please delete the content if it crosses you guys in any way…
“Lay off high performers”… always sounds like a really good thing to me. Keep the B players and cut the A players. I wish people could be honest. Just once. News like this make this industry look bad.
Technorati has been having all sorts of problems. I’ve been trying to add my blog (Google SEO Tools) for weeks and haven’t gotten any support from them…
This company I don’t understand. I use Digg or add to Facebook instead.
Once I wanted to add Technorati to my site and I couldn’t find a button.
Well, what you expect them to say? “They are non performers and we should have let them go a long time ago”? Come on guys, allow some diplomacy in a corporate statement, - or don’t take what they say seriously.
The layoffs come just over a month after Technorati acquired ad network AdEngage for an undisclosed amount.
I remember meeting with some high up there for lunch 3 years ago
Lots of layoffs everywhere. Walmart doing well so and salesplanet.ws