Around the Net

New Year's Day Massacre At Myspace: Staff Could Be Cut In Half

Sources tell All Things D that Myspace is mulling over taking a hatchet to its 1,100 staff count by half now that its a lean-mean entertainment machine. "While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire Myspace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money," reports All Things D.

This is traditionally the type of bad news companies like to leak out right before a big holiday weekend (and this is one of the sleepiest such times of the year). And the trail is not too difficult to follow on this one. Myspace owner News Corp also owns Dow Jones which, in turn, publishes All Things D (which the blog disclosed).

The story also suggests that the only route to saving MySpace is a sale of the site. "One juicy rumor that has been going around suggests Facebook gamemaker Zynga as a potential acquirer of Myspace," says D.

Top-level management shifting could either help or hinder this sale, depending on your point of view. "The company recently faced trouble at the top. It hired ex-Facebook COO Owen Van Natta as CEO in April 2009 but had him step down just ten months later," writes VentureBeat. Van Natta is now EVP at Zynga.

According to All Things Dig, News Corp's digital media veep Jack Kennedy has been tasked with exploring the option of a sell-off. Of the likelihood of a possible sale, Silicon Alley Insider zings, "Funny that it wasn't a year ago that we reported News Corp was looking to dump MySpace, and PR people called to scream our ear off about it."

Myspace's morass caused SearchEngineLand to ponder this what-if: "What if Google had bought MySpace instead of News Corp? Google is currently struggling to define/execute a social strategy to better compete with the perceived rising threat of Facebook." There's still time, posits the blog, but concedes a Google-Myspace tie-up is unlikely at this juncture. But still, what if?

Read the whole story at All Things D et al »

2 comments about "New Year's Day Massacre At Myspace: Staff Could Be Cut In Half ".
Check to receive email when comments are posted.
  1. Andre Szykier from maps capital management, December 31, 2010 at 3:56 p.m.

    Google was a big pusher of Social-API with MySpace as the first integrated social media site of size.

    If they want to keep SOCAPI alive, it would make sense to acquire MySpace and build out its Google Lab services and Online apps.

    If not, it signals that Google is not going to be a player in the collaboration space. Ever....

  2. Warren Lee from SEO-CUBED.COM, January 25, 2011 at 1:56 p.m.

    An acquisition of Myspace would not be needed to keep the social API alive, this has been growing steadily on its own in different ways such as OpenId. I believe Myspace is dying and has lost a huge amount of its user base and also SEO traffic. The other day I went to login to my old Myspace page to clean the dust off the shelf and poke around, and guess what.. some one at Myspace must have screwed up because Myspace deleted almost all of my content. This was a massive SEO FAIL. I'll bet if my account got deleted i'm not the only one. And given closer inspection yes it appears MYSPACE majorly screwed up their SEO at the end of the year. http://seo-cubed.com

Next story loading loading..