Blog search engine Technorati has laid off close to 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees in its PR, engineering and general admin areas. The company’s CEO, Richard Jalichandra confirmed the layoffs. He says they were necessary for the company to continue on the path towards profitability. The reduction will leave the company with 37 employees. Technorati suffered an earlier round of layoffs last September, letting go 6 people and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. We’ve added this to the layoff tracker.
Jalichandra maintains that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network, Technorati Media. Jalichandra says that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible.
Jalichandra also says that Twitter and Facebook are changing the blogosphere—but in a good way. He says that Twitter and Facebook are just other platforms on which blogs can gain visibility, and Technorati is beginning to track activity on those platforms as well. For instance, here’s a link to Jalichandra’s Twitter page on Technorati. Nevertheless, traffic to Technorati itself over the past several months has flattened at about 5 million unique visitors worldwide, and is declining in the U.S., according to comScore.