Yahoo restructure may be announced next week

The firm's new chief executive, Corol Bartz, would make the sweeping changes in order to better position the firm following her predecessor Jerry Yang's difficult period of tenure.

Under Yang's leadership and the management structure he put in place, Yahoo experienced a continuing decline against Google in search market share, swinging share prices caused by a failed Microsoft acquisition attempt and collapse of a Google search deal that would have brought the company a significant increase in revenue.

Bartz was chosen to lead Yahoo mainly due to her proven track record of driving growth while she was chief executive of Autodesk. For example, between 2002 to 2006, she lifted the software design firm's revenues from US$285m to US$1.523bn.

The rejig is likely to take place on Wednesday and could be either pushed out in a couple of weeks or rolled out in phases, according to the Wall Street Journal's affiliated blog, All Things Digital.

Sources told the blog's co-editor, Kara Swisher that Bartz is planning to enforce a more "traditional" structure on Yahoo, similar to the one she employed at Autodesk, which will be a significant change from the employee structure Yang put in place.

"Most expect Bartz to do a C-level style set-up, with executives like a chief operating officer, chief technology officer and also a new, more powerful chief media officer (who will also head PR), all reporting to her," said Swisher.

Swisher cites her sources as several top executives inside Yahoo, a number of company outsiders, and a memo that Bartz wrote to staff last week to tell them they had a "big week" ahead of them.

"Yahoo execs are nervously awaiting the moves by Bartz to put a new regime in place, in order to more easily power through a massive reset of the troubled company," said Swisher.

The restructure would follow a number of senior executives leaving Yahoo for Microsoft, including Larry Heck, Yahoo's vice president of search and advertising sciences at Yahoo Labs, and Qi Lu, Yahoo's vice president of engineering for search and advertising.

But the news would follow a week of celebrations for the firm.

Market research from ComScore revealed that in the month of January Yahoo had increased its market share in the US search market by 0.5 per cent, while its biggest rival Google faced a 0.5 per cent decrease in share.

Yahoo also launched a new programme for advertisers designed to further increase its revenue called Rich Ads In Search, which will let advertisers put images, video and location information into adverts hosted in search results.