Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Top Ad Sales Exec on West Coast Departs Yahoo

One of Yahoo’s highest-ranking premium advertising sales execs–David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales–is leaving the company, people familiar with the situation said.

Sources said Dickman, who will leave Yahoo at the end of the month after three years at the company, is reportedly going to Time Warner (TWX) unit Warner Bros. to work in digital sales.

Well liked at Yahoo (YHOO), Dickman was impacted in a sales reorganization done in the spring.

At the time, Atlanta-based regional sales VP Mitch Spolan was named to lead Yahoo’s North American field sales, consolidating its display ad sales groups, which had previously been split between the East and West Coasts.

Before that, Dickman ran the Western sales and another exec the Eastern sales, serving big display advertisers. The latter exec took over agency sales, while Dickman remained running sales on the West Coast, reporting to Spolan.

Dickman’s departure comes after another top Yahoo display ad exec, Todd Taplin (pictured here), left last week. He was regional VP of sales in New England and Canada, responsible for big Yahoo display advertising accounts like Fidelity Investments in Boston.

Taplin–who was also well regarded at Yahoo–took a job at Collective Media in New York, as its new Chief Revenue Officer.

Flux at the Yahoo ad sales group in the U.S.–which accounts for most of the Internet giant’s revenues–will be closely watched by Wall Street right now since it is also charged with selling premium search ads for both Yahoo and Microsoft (MSFT) under the recent deal they struck. Yahoo is also aiming to turbocharge its premium graphical ad sales business.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald