Social Media

Major Layoffs Coming To MySpace. Could Hit 25%

Layoff described by one source as ":massive" are coming to MySpace although there is no official word yet from the company.  MySpace shed 5% of its staff a year ago and laid of as many as 45 more last month. But these cuts will go far deeper, according to TechCrunch and could hit several hundred. Management will inevitably blame a tough economy and plummeting ad revenue, but declining traffic is the real culprit.

Monthly unique visitors to MySpace have fallen from 64.6 million in June of 2008 to 56.8 million in May of 2009 while Facebook rose from 35.2 million to 113 million during the same period. New leadership has been brought in both at parent Fox Interactive and MySpace to turn the ship around with music as the cornerstone of the rebuilding process.

A brief personal message to the head of MySpace Music:

Good luck, Courtney.  This is going to be a tough one and you have many masters,

Now is the time to get the indie and d.i.y. music communityies more involved again They helped create MySpace, and they can help make it relevent again. It won't cost millions either.  Just equal treatment and a place at the table.

And you don't have a lot of time before Facebook finally jumps more into the music game.  They really have no choice but to.

Believe it or not, a lot of us are routing for you.

Bruce Houghton

Bruce Houghton on 06/12/2009 in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (8)
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8 Comments

  1. Eh…my mom is on Facebook, re-connecting with her old college friends. It’s icky.
    I’m sticking with MySpace to find new music.
    Sally

  2. Myspace is better for finding new music. But I think people are tired of the freak show, ie disgustingly designed profile pages, fake profiles, pedophiles, bots, etc. Facebook is playing with fire allowing vampire bites, pirate hugs, and weird profile add-ons like that. But I think Facebook is relatively cleaner than Myspace. If only there were a filter to keep people from ever loading shitty music, Myspace would be easier to find new music. But I quit finding music on myspace. I find new stuff on blogs and stuff.

  3. “Believe it or not, a lot of us are routing for you.”
    And I’m routing for *you*, Bruce. I’m a Cisco small-office 800-series with 3G.

  4. Facebook is 300 million people doing a whole lot of nothing. If Zuckerberg hadn’t suckered the Russians out of $200 million to keep going,he’d be laying off too. There’s no way to monetize these social websites because people aren’t on them to buy anything. They’re there to socialize with their friends. I doubt if the advertisers are realizing any ROI (return on investment) and are pulling back. Face book is just trying to build up numbers so they can dump this on someone else for a profit,just like the guys at Myspace did with Rupert Murdoch, but the big money boys have seen Rupert is losing money,and I doubt if Facebook is going to find a buyer.If Facebook is such a good investment,why didn’t Bill Gates put any more money into it? Myspace is still king for new music,movies, and comedy. I just don’t know how long they can last if they don’t start charging bands for their pages.

  5. Waaay too tough to get laid through Facebook…
    I’m still having a great time bagging chicks through MySpace.
    Too many friends of my parents and college professors on Facebook…

  6. MySpace made it veryhard to find new music in their re-design. You used to be able to sort by style of music but now you have to go through “charts”. you used to be able to search by influences. Nope.

  7. Yes agreed!
    Its really hard to monotize the social network websites. If u throw ads in there to make money ppl dont like it and run away. So its a trade off between the good user experience and making money. In case of facebook there is not parent company sitting on top of it that wants it to remain profitable every year. In case of MySpace we have News Corp which is trying squeeze as much of profit as it can from MySpace -FIM. Currently MySpace is breaking even but seems like Murdoch does not like that!!!
    Hence Layoffs!!!!!!

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