The Fool slashes dot.com jobs

Motley Fool, the popular online personal finance site and chatroom, has become the latest dot.com to slash jobs.

Almost a third of its staff - equivalent to 115 employees - will lose their jobs both in Washington and London.

The news has taken dot.com observers by surprise, since the Motley Fool this month secured $30m of new funding from Softbank, AOL Time Warner and previous funding partners.

Many similar sites have embarked on ruthless cutback programmes because of funding shortages.

Advertising slowdown

Already this year Disney has announced that it is to abandon its Go.com site, virtual shop Letsbuyit narrowly escaped bankruptcy and the online retailer eToys ceased its European operations.

And even some of the most popular internet sites which are now household names such as book seller Amazon or search engine Ask Jeeves are still running at substantial losses.

Securing enough funding to stay alive during the time it takes to turn a dot.com into a profitable business is vitally important to the survival of all internet ventures.

Motley Fool has the support - and cash - of some big players and seems to be doing well in the area of funding.

But it will, like most other dot.coms, suffer from lower advertising revenue this year.

Better investors

The company has also closed its German-language website as part of its streamlining process.

Most of this round of job cuts will come from the US.

The Motley Fool was set up in 1994 through the AOL website.

The site features news, analysis and stock market data all designed at making better investors out of its visitors.