Yahoo Is Said to Be Planning to Cut About 650 Jobs

Yahoo! Inc., owner of the largest Web portal in the U.S., plans to eliminate about 650 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce, part of its two-year-old turnaround effort, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company is set to make the cuts as early as today, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter hasn’t been made public.

Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz, who joined Yahoo in January 2009, made a larger round of cuts last year, in addition to shutting underperforming websites. The company has struggled to stanch a migration of users and advertising dollars to Facebook Inc., which Yahoo now sees as its biggest rival. Facebook passed Yahoo as the top seller of online display ads in the U.S. a year ago, based on the number of times an ad is viewed, according to Reston, Virginia-based ComScore Inc.

Yahoo fell 7 cents to $16.63 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock is little changed in value this year.

Kim Rubey, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, declined to comment.

Yahoo’s job cuts were previously reported by the All Things Digital and TechCrunch blogs.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg

Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz speaking in New York.

Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz speaking in New York. Photographer: Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg