• USA Today, Friday, April 24, 2009 11:45 AM

The ousting of Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson at the top of the MySpace hierarchy underscores tumult not just at MySpace but also for its peers, says USA Today's Jon Swartz. Facebook, too, has suffered "a brain drain," Swartz says, as it takes bigger steps towards going public. For example, CFO Gideon Yu abruptly left the company earlier this month.

"When you're around five years (as MySpace and Facebook have been), the pressure to monetize intensifies," says Caroline Dangson, research analyst at IDC. "It's already a horrible time for established businesses to make money during the recession. The assumption was that advertising would pay the bills for social-media firms, but (display) ad spending is down -- which is crucial to these guys."

Even so, the management shakeup at MySpace isn't all that surprising, Swartz says, especially when you consider MySpace's "sputtering growth" and Facebook's rise. While this may have been more of a function of MySpace's focus on monetization over growth, MySpace still fell shy of the revenue targets set by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, MySpace's owner. Meanwhile, Facebook has been growing like a weed, passing MySpace in worldwide users last year. It now has 200 million compared to MySpace's 130 million. MySpace is still the largest social net in the U.S. but its year-over-year numbers slipped 4% in March, according to comScore.

Read the whole story at USA Today »