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.
Why are there no comments on this post yet, must be a sign of some kind, or maybe I just spend to much time on TechCrunch?
I have only ever used Technorati for their Top 100 Blog list.
I wish them the best.
cuz no one really interested in a post about 4 ppl lose their jobs.
why don’t we track the number of high school kids leave their part time job @mcdonald everyday. that would be more impressing
Why? Because Technorati is already dead.
I hear what you guys are saying, however it is still not great that people are losing jobs all over the play. I wonder how the innovation and the rate at which people work on their own stuff changes during times like this. Would be an interesting stat to check out. The government should fund some technology guys to get stuff started and generate some jobs/cash flow generating.
Its really showing.
If you try to add a blog to Technorati, which should be one of the simplest, most common things they do, it doesn’t work, sometimes breaking at each of 2 simple phases.
It just hangs, and no one responds.
Shame if we’re watching Technorati die.
Pat O’Malley
they really should have taken the $200 million that News Corp. offered them in late 05.
That, is just no joke at all. $200 mil for a glorified directory, I would have taken it and RAN!
maybe they thought they were going to be the next google for blogs and would be worth more. someone offer me 200 million i ask where do i sign lol.
Yeah, but it is always easy to look back when you don’t take money. 2005 things were booming, they probably thought that things would continue to be on the rise. This probably happened in early 2005 and then all of a sudden things started to crash.
I believe that technorati has alot to develop in order to keep up with the current web tendecies.
In times they where inovative and brought some sunshine to bloggers lifes but right now there’s hardly anything worth while in technorati that would make bloggers use their service as something relevant.
According to Google Analytics and our internal counter, Technorati.com was
visited by 7.5 million unique visitors in February. More significantly,
while Technorati.com is a crucial part of our business, it is only one
component of a much larger business. Our network, Technorati Media, includes
more than 300 sites with over 80 million unique visitors and a billion pages
views of content on a monthly basis (according to Google Analytics), and
comScore ranked our network as the 3rd largest blogging property in
February. Our cooperative of bloggers and social media sites is clearly our
biggest growth area. That said, we also own and operate BlogCritics.com, a
news and reviews site and community of more than 3000 blog writers.
To address some of the comments, we’ve made significant improvements to the
Technorati.com
property this year:
@Patrick O’Malley: We’ve just overhauled and relaunched blog claiming
this week – the process should be pretty smooth from here on out.
We’ve added blog claiming for Twitter as well as the ability to auto
tweet any tag articles, blurbs or blog reviews you post to the site.
We’ve also launched a new spider too. This new technology is currently
re-indexing the blogosphere and has temporarily resulted slow updating the
past week or two. However, it has already cleared massive amounts of spam
from our index, delivering faster, cleaner search results.
I don’t use technorati that much anymore. Used to like it but with all the links on facebook and twitter I dont need it to find good blogs anymore.
Technorati? That thing’s still around?
As a blogger I try them at least once a year and I am always massively disappointed. They could just never get their stuff together it seems. I’ve always felt they would never be anything more than an over hyped & short lived internet buzz.
Slow news day here at TC again? Four Employees? OMG apply for a bailout ?
When a sole proprietor goes for a walk in the forest, has he laid off 100% of his work force?
lol
I stopped subscribing to their “news” as soon as I started getting celebrity tidbits on my newsreader.
R.I.P.
Technorati was difficult to use and monitor what was really happening with my blog A Week In The Life of A Redhead. It would be up, then down and the stats seemed to go all over the place without the feedback a blogger needs to have with regard to a site that is suppose to be stats driven. I get more from Stat Counter and Google. I gave up.
I decided to give Technorati one last try with a second blog 8 Women Dream and after 6 months of being registered Technorati still hasn’t ranked the site. I have left the tag up because the eight of us make fun of it at our meetings, “We must not exist if Technorati says so”.
I notice this weekend when I stumbled upon your post here that I can’t login to Technorati anymore. The message they are giving is ”
Oops, something went wrong The account section isn’t working properly at the moment. Please try back again later.” They also have a banner at the top that says “Notice: Maintenance May 9, traffic is split between 2 data centers and may be a bit slow now and then.”
I use Facebook, Twitter, Blog Catalog and Google blog search and have long left the dream of finding myself on any list at Technorati long ago. I don’t know anyone who understands who they are or what they do anymore and there was nothing about them at AdTech.
I did enjoy the Technorati corporate response here which made them look uptight, unhappy and out of touch.
Technorati has had the error “The account section isn’t working properly at the moment. Please try back again later.” on their verify account link for the last couple of years. It’s never been fixed. I’ve tried weekly and gave up after a couple of months.