As we’ve heard over the past few days, AOL has started implementing layoffs across its properties in the wake of the Huffington Post acquisition. The deal, which amounted to $315 million, closed on Monday of this week. We’ve confirmed the firings with AOL and here is the breakdown of the exact numbers and where the layoffs will take place.
AOL will be letting go a little over 200 U.S. employees, around 120 of which are editorial staffers. The remaining employees that are being let go also work in AOL’s media business but in other operations (technology, product). With the merger with the Huffington Post, AOL will actually be gaining 250 employees from the media property, around 150 of which are editorial staffers. AOL says that after the merger, there is a net gain of 17 editorial staffers. And including Patch, AOL still employs 1,200 journalists in editorial.
In total, India’s casualties are above 700 employees. In India, AOL will be letting go around 400 employees and transitioning around approximately 300 employees to become contractors. We understand that in Asia, AOL wants staffers to focus on creating products for the Asian markets as opposed to providing back-end support to global operations.
So in total, today’s bloodbath has resulted in AOL is shedding just under 1,000 employees.
The layoffs resulted from eliminating the redundancies created by merging The Huffington Post with AOL’s content properties. Arianna Huffington is now the President and Editor In Chief of all of AOL’s media properties, which is now called the Huffington Post Media Group (and which includes TechCrunch).
This isn’t the largest set of layoffs for AOL—the company let 2,000 employees go in 2007 and gave 700 staffers pink slips in 2009. And when AOL spun off from Time Warner, it also suffered massive layoffs.