Terra Lycos to Cut 21% of Staff

[Brett_Tabke]

[masshightech.com...]

Terra Lycos, the Spain-based Internet company, said today that it will cut 174 jobs or 21 percent of its U.S. workforce and will phase out several sites in the Terra Lycos network.

The company had a total of 2,900 employees worldwide and 836 in the United States before the cuts.

[Tor]

Terra Lyco`s financials is still in the red and they are loosing money fast. This is part of a bigger plan that they have to put into effect in order to be profitable next year. They are also in the market of selling the biggest internet newspaper in Norway [nettavisen.no ]. The paper is loosing money and Terra Lycos wants to find new owners, preferably another media company.

[rubble88]

From the Boston Globe [digitalmass.boston.com]

Yesterday's restructuring, however, indicates that wringing revenues from Internet traffic remains a challenge. TerraLycos's Risi said the staff reduction would be accompanied by a paring down of the service's offerings. The company will be combining, phasing out, or ''maintaining for the time being'' a number of general content areas such as travel, health, kids, careers, fashion, and autos. In the future, TerraLycos will focus on sites and content areas devoted to search, finance, dating, Web publishing, sports, technology news, online games, and entertainment.

[rcjordan]

From an affiliate sales perspective, it's interesting to note which categories they are leaving (travel, careers, etc.) and which they are keeping (finance, dating).

[heini]

>content areas
right, that bit is interesting. I would tend to think anyhow the reasoning behind leaving some and keeping others might be more in what kind of revenues they are after.

The content areas they intend to keep are all connected more to services than ad orientated content delivery.

- Entertainment = streaming videos, live music etc for subscribers
- Sports = live conferences, result services etc, probably fee based
- Online Gaming = Fee based
- Webpublishing = domain selling, hosting, web based services, fee based
- Finance, Dating = fee based premium services

Some of those services are already in place. Looks to me as if they try to cut loose everything that's ad based, in favour of fee based services.

Lycos is one of the mega dotcoms who still suffer severely from the burst of the online advertizing bubble.
They started a while ago to move from relying on advertizer revenue to user generated revenue streams.
Looks like a logical step on that route.