On Tuesday, Yahoo! made the announcement that they would be laying off approximately ten percent of their work force that counts 15,000 people, in an attempt to cut down the company’s expenses.

Officials have also revealed that Yahoo!’s net income for the third quarter of this fiscal year had registered a decrease by 64 percent, mostly due to the fact that the reductions to the marketing budget had severely affected their online advertising segment.

The company has yet to make profit predictions for the year to come, but they did abate their previous forecasts for what is left of this year.

The decision to cut staff has come as a last resort for Yahoo!, since other strategies such as a search advertising deal with search giant Google and merging with Time Warner’s AOL unit have been to no avail.

Company execs have stated that although recent major events, including the Beijing Olympics, the presidential campaign for the 2008 United States elections in November and the financial crisis that the nation was facing, had managed to attract a larger number of visitors to Yahoo!’s website, the profit these views earned them did not meet their expectations.

Furthermore, they said that the targeted result to the staff cut was reducing annual expenses by over $400 million before the end of 2008.

Yahoo! is said to be also planning to cut several services, as well, but no info on the matter has been released. Nevertheless, the company has stressed that their projects to develop a new advertising system and a new home page were still on the agenda and that it would be pouring money into them no matter its financial issues.