Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo, which has lately witnessed a steady stream of its senior executives depart in the past month, on Wednesday announced that it has named “Ross Levinsohn,” a former president of News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, to head its Americas operations, as Yahoo struggles to rebuild its management ranks and stagnant revenue growth.
Levinsohn, who will join Yahoo in November, would fill in the void that Hilary Schneider, who unveiled plans to leave last month. Her disclosure came as several other Yahoo top executives resigned, raising questions about the company’s direction and its leadership under Carol A. Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive.
Levinsohn will be delegated with the responsibility of managing the Internet company’s media group, advertising sales, and partnerships for the Americas region, the company said on Wednesday. He will report directly to Yahoo’s chief executive Bartz.
“Ross has a phenomenal track record of implementing digital media strategies that increase user engagement and, most importantly, accelerate topline growth,” Bartz said in a statement.
“I am confident that Ross’s strategic vision, in addition to his deep industry experience, will allow us to solidify our position as the largest digital media, content and communications business around the globe.”
Prior to joining Yahoo, Levinsohn was the co-founder and managing director of private equity firm Fuse Capital, which is focused on investing in digital media and communications companies. He previously held senior management positions at News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, where he was responsible for running the day-to-day business, designing the overall strategy and leading investments. He was instrumental in piloting its 2005 acquisition of social network Myspace for 580 million dollars and a lucrative ad contract with Google.
Levinsohn also held senior management positions at AltaVista, an early pioneer in Web search, CBS Sportsline where he was responsible for all content and development for the sports site, and television network HBO where he launched and supervised a unit developing new programming and revenue streams.
“Yahoo! is one of the premier Internet companies in the world,” Levinsohn said. “Having this opportunity to work with a group of immensely talented people to enhance Yahoo’s leadership position is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Yahoo, the No. 2 Web search site in the United States behind Google Inc., touts a monthly audience of more than 600 million users but investors have been disappointed by several quarters of flat revenue and uncertain strategic direction. The struggling company is trying to revive its revenue growth and its popularity among Web surfers, facing tough competition from social networking sites like Facebook.
Bartz was appointed last year to turn around Yahoo’s fortunes after the previous chief executive, co-founder Jerry Yang, rejected a takeover offer from Microsoft. But lately, the company has been rocked by a string of high-level departures in recent months, including Schneider, Vice President of Media Jimmy Pitaro and Senior Vice President of North America Audience, Mobile and Local David Ko.
Now Bartz’s aim has been to focus Yahoo on its strength as the world’s largest Web portal with popular e-mail and instant messaging services. Concurrently, she has outsourced services considered to be less critical, most notably handing over the search business to Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and its Web search partner Microsoft announced that they have finalized the integration of all advertising accounts to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter platform.
Yahoo and Microsoft said that adCenter was now catering all paid search advertisements on Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo! partner sites and publisher networks in the United States and Canada.
“Managing a single account for both Bing and Yahoo! will let advertisers save time and simplify their campaigns,” they said in a statement.
Microsoft and Yahoo! reached an agreement last year which calls for the US software giant’s Bing search engine to eventually power searches at all Yahoo! Websites.