Industry Moves: Former FT.com Publisher Leaves Google For Bloomberg
This story was written by Joseph Tartakoff.
Bloomberg has hired yet another executive with big Internet company experience to help it become less dependent on terminal revenue. Ien Cheng (pictured, right), a director of product management at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) who was responsible for the company's ad products in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will join Bloomberg as the chief of staff of its multimedia group, the WSJ reports. Before joining Google last June, Cheng was the publisher and managing editor of FT.com. He is credited with increasing the site's traffic substantially, particularly in Asia. At Bloomberg, Cheng will join former Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) executive Kevin Krim, who was hired last month to run Bloomberg.com.
Cheng is the latest senior executive to leave Google since the beginning of the year. Top ad-sales exec Tim Armstrong, Asia-Pacific and Latin America president Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, and VP of industry development and marketing Jeff Levick have all said they will leave the company.
Robert adds: Cheng, in his departing email to colleagues, said his time at Google had been "shorter than expected", but only because he was drawn to the "dream combination" of returning to the news business and running a technology department. Cheng had introduced FT.com's multi-tiered access model in October 2007, mostly centered around giving 20 free stories a month to non-paying subscribers (it's now just 10). He will now report to Bloomberg Multimedia CEO Andy Lack.
By Joseph Tartakoff