City Grid is a name that many of you have most likely not heard of at all, and if you had to guess what they did you could find yourself being very wrong. So, before we talk about the job cuts being made by the company lets begin by looking at how the organization has chosen to describe itself, “The local advertising market is just plain tough. Small businesses still struggle to see value in online advertising, local sales organizations struggle to make profits and many industry partnerships are not equitable. We know it’s hard. So we built something different, something better. CityGrid is the only local advertising platform that works for everyone. We believe the only way to be truly successful in local is to provide an open platform that is built on equitable partnership and creates a healthy competitive environment for everyone.”

Sadly the company is getting ready to put about 15% of its workforce out of their jobs in a bid to reduce their expenses and put the company on solid fiscal footing. The company, which employs about 450 people in total, may trigger a mass layoff action if the company lays off enough workers in a single location. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

Interestingly enough the company, in its most recent release, chose to highlight a new deal it has made instead of talking about the job cuts that the company is making in the near future, “ CityGrid, an operating business of IAC (Nasdaq: IACI) and a leader in local business advertising solutions, announced the acquisition of Felix, the rapidly growing performance-based local advertising service for small and medium-sized businesses.  Felix will operate as an independent business under CityGrid, which includes local sites Citysearch, Insider Pages and Urbanspoon, and will report to CityGrid’s CEO, Jason Finger.  Terms of the deal have not been disclosed… Felix is innovating advertising by offering the most sophisticated pay-per-action phone advertising product to local businesses.  Instead of paying for clicks or all phone calls, merchants only pay for high quality customer calls that are likely to lead to customers.  Using advanced voice recognition and call analytics technology, bundled with easy-to-use tools, Felix enables merchants to market themselves with highly effective techniques previously available only to large enterprises.  For businesses that depend upon high-quality phone calls to acquire new customers, Felix offers one of the best advertising services in the local market segment.”