TripleLift Announces Layoffs, The Latest In A Miserable Trend
TripleLift laid off a fifth of its workforce on Thursday, the equivalent of more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has learned.
The cuts only affect employees in the US and Canada.
TripleLift confirmed the layoffs to AdExchanger.
The company says it’s taking the move as a course correction after weaker-than-expected growth. TripleLift has invested heavily in the company’s growth over the past year despite inflation, concerns about an impending recession and a slowdown in advertising spending.
“We have not responded quickly enough to the changing landscape and built appropriately for this leaner phase,” CEO Dave Clark wrote in a memo announcing the layoffs on Thursday.
TripleLift’s headcount will now be about the same as last year following the acquisition of 1plusX, the memo said.
The cuts at TripleLift are just the latest in a litany of layoffs that have taken place across the ad tech market recently. There has been bloodshed among the biggies, including Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle Data Cloud, and among the players in the programmatic ecosystem.
Just this week, Yahoo announced that more than 1,000 employees will be laid off from its ad tech group as Yahoo closes its entire SSP business and native ad network Gemini. EMX (ENGINE Media Exchange) and its parent company Big Village filed for bankruptcy Thursday and ceased operations.
It’s worth noting that TripleLift, Yahoo, and EMX all operate (or operate) in the SSP and Ad Exchange category.
But they have something else in common: every company is or was backed by private equity.
Lake Capital Partners bought Engine (later renamed Big Village) in 2014, and Yahoo and TripleLift both sold it to various PE firms during the 2021 boom.
Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in TripleLift in March 2021 for $1.4 billion, and Apollo Global Management bought Yahoo from Verizon for $5 billion in September.
“But then, about a year ago, our whole world changed,” Clark wrote in his letter to TripleLift employees.
The mood changed from feast to famine.
“Building for leaner times means driving our costs down to manageable levels while being very thoughtful and selective about the areas of the business that we want to invest in to grow,” he wrote. “So less, but bolder.”
This is TripleLift’s second round of layoffs in less than three years. The company cut 7% of its global workforce and closed some of its European offices in April 2020.