It has been a heart wrenching couple of weeks for our management team. Due to the transition that we are under way to move all of our resources and focus to our new product Platrium, we made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount and lay off 68 people this week. There is nothing worse in business than saying goodbye to smart, hard-working, dedicated employees. These employees were loyal to us and they wanted to stay, and we wanted to keep them. It is unfortunate, but sometimes these things are necessary. As I stood before them this week I told them that while this is a business decision, I recognize that it has very personal implications – and for that I am very sorry to have to make this decision. Zango has a unique culture and as a result most of our employees are far more dedicated and committed to their jobs than is typical.
One laid off employee told me, “I’m not surprised that this is happening, I just wish it wasn’t happening to me.” Another wrote to me and said, “I’m sad I won’t be there to continue to help drive things forward… and I’m truly appreciative of the opportunity.” Still another laid off employee wrote, “I thank you…and others for giving me the chance, helping me develop some new skills, and for believing in me.” I don’t believe that these are the sentiments of employees from a “normal” company, but rather are indications of just how special this place really is.
As difficult it is to say goodbye to some truly wonderful employees, my passion and my focus is on how to make our business win. To that end, I’m thrilled with the progress we have been making with Platrium. Platrium is the final integration of all of the companies we have acquired over the past four years and promises to be a fantastic consumer product.
If you’ve followed Zango at all you know that we have our fair share of detractors, people who love to hate us. There are a couple reasons why. First, they don’t like how we use Web publishers to distribute Zango – they think that it is possible for some of these partners to game our system and to not provide the consumer with a consistent experience when installing our software. That may have happened in the past, but since 2005 we’ve invested millions of dollars in technology development and have added a full staff of compliance experts to ensure this isn’t the case anymore. But while the facts have changed, the arguments from our detractors have not (in fact, some continue to tell only parts of the story – see “Close Butt… Not Quite” on the Zango corporate blog). Their second point is that they think we steal affiliate advertising commissions by using our Targeted Visitor ad format. I can state emphatically that we don’t, but the reality is that a few affiliates have tried to break our rules strictly prohibiting this behavior by attempting to use our automated advertising system to stomp on affiliate cookies. We police this activity aggressively through policies and technology and frankly it is a miniscule problem that always gets detected and corrected, but it does provide for some good fear mongering and headlines. In any case, the noise around these two points has been a drag on our business and has kept us from the growth that we should be experiencing.
So here’s the good news; Platrium doesn’t have either of these problems. In order to install Platrium you have to go to Platrium.com, so there is no complex affiliate network for a detractor to point to. And we have the very highest standards of notice and consent – far better than Google or Yahoo! or anyone else for that matter. On the second point, since Platrium doesn’t deliver popups or Targeted Visitor windows there is no way for an advertiser to attempt to game our system by stepping on cookies. The reality is that we have an incredibly powerful business model, a great consumer service that literally millions of consumers around the globe use every day, a targeting platform that delivers unprecedented ROI for advertisers and a monetization tool for webmasters and content providers that makes them more money from their traffic than they can get elsewhere. Platrium keeps all of those things and at the same time gets rid of the two pieces of our business that have drug us down. Needless to say, I’m very excited about the future.
