Layoffs in the dot-com world continue, as Stockhouse Media Corp., which operates online investment Web portals around the world, announced it's slashing staff.
Company founder, president and CEO Jeff Berwick told CBC Business Online that his company cut 50 staff members at its Vancouver headquarters on Tuesday and 7 people in its Toronto editorial office on Wednesday.
The company will keep three to four editorial employees in its Toronto office to handle market commentaries and manage irs stock bulletin boards.
The Canadian cuts are part of a plan to trim 90 people from the company's global operations.
Berwick said Stockhouse moved to scale back its international operations because revenues were not strong.
Started in 1995, Stockhouse operates financial Web sites in Canada, United States, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.
"We basically took a look at the value of what we were producing and what it was bringing back to us in terms of revenues...and we felt that our editorial staff in Canada had grown a little too big for the benefit it was bringing back to our company," Berwick said.
"So we just brought that back in line to reflect the revenues that we're generating from our editorial," he said.
Like many dot-com operations, Stockhouse has been generating money through advertising. But in the wake of the bursting of the technology stock bubble, venture capital and online advertising dollars have both become increasingly hard for dot-coms to raise.
Stockhouse's Berwick said the company hopes to generate money through new methods, other than just advertising.
"Our plan since day one has been just to grow a large amount of traffic and user base, and then at that point start taking advantage of it and starting to monetize the eyeballs that we have," Berwick said.
"To date, we've mostly just survived on advertising revenues, but that's all changing this year," he said, adding that Stockhouse plans to offer subscription premium services, such as real-time portfolio tracking for Canadian stocks.
Last week, Stockhouse also unveiled plans to form an alliance with Opus 2 Direct to design and sell mutual funds on the Internet.
In the wake of the tech stock meltdown, a year of "hardcore losses" at Internet ventures followed, Berwick said.
But amid all the layoffs, the sector may be scraping the bottom, he added.
"I totally get the feeling that we're right at the bottom right now. We're trying to be careful (and) cautious, but at the same poised for more growth in the future," Berwick said.
A private company, Stockhouse is financially backed by Hollinger International and the South China Morning Post.