Days after posting modest sales growth in the last quarter, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced Thursday she is promoting a veteran advertising executive to be the company s chief revenue officer — the first person in charge of running global sales in more than a year.
Ads are what make Yahoo keep ticking, but the company has been struggling to offset declining revenue from search and website display ads with new income from ads that run on smartphone screens and video streams.
After a decade at Microsoft and six years at Amazon, Lisa Utzschneider joined Yahoo s Manhattan office last fall and was in charge of sales in North and South America, where Mayer said she has successfully integrated sales across Yahoo, BrightRoll (the video ad network it acquired last year), Flurry (a mobile ad network also acquired last year) and Tumblr to help bring new opportunities and tremendous value to advertisers. Now, all sales teams globally will report to her.
Mayer called the position a new role in a Tumblr post, though similar jobs have been held by others. The last chief revenue officer, Michael Barrett, dropped out in 2012 during a tumultuous period that began when Mayer hired Henrique de Castro as chief operating officer to boost global advertising sales. Mayer fired de Castro early last year and said she would not directly replace him.
In other Yahoo HR news, the company said Thursday it will be working harder to recruit engineers who can build Web products for the disabled.
The reality is that most recent graduates with computer science degrees do not have experience or appreciation for the need to build for disabled individuals, said Larry Goldberg, Yahoo s director of accessible media, in a statement. We recognize that we need talented engineers with experience developing accessible products to make our products available to everyone. To find engineers with the appropriate skill set, Yahoo, along with a number of tech industry partners, will include standard language in open job requisitions to indicate that we prefer engineering candidates with accessibility experience.
Other tech industry partners that signed on to the campaign include Facebook, Adobe, Intuit, LinkedIn, Dropbox and Microsoft.
And in product news, Yahoo for the first time Thursday said it has optimized its Yahoo News Digest to make it available on Android tablets. Invented by wunderkind Nick D Aloisio, the news curation app is already available on Android phones and Apple devices, most recently on the Apple Watch.
Above: Yahoo s revenue has been mostly stagnant in recent years, according to this chart the company presented as part of its second-quarter earnings report Tuesday.