MySpace Cuts Staff in Half (not literally)

Remember back about six or seven years ago when all the kids were raving over this cool new website, MySpace? It was the latest and greatest tool in the social networking specter, allowing users to personalize their own pages as well as connect and interact with friends. Back in the heyday people couldn’t get enough. Now accounts sit stagnant.

Usage is down and Facebook seems to be winning the war, leaving its predecessor in the dust statistically. In June of 2009, on the day Facebook’s usage officially surpassed MySpace’s the company cut 30% of its domestic staff taking it down to about 1000 employees.

At the time MySpace chief executive Owen Van Natta said, "Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company." The current CEO, Mike Jones said, "Today's tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability,” after the company slashed the rest of the staff by 47%. Globally 500 employees were laid off to where little of the staff remains except in the programming department where layoffs were lighter.

Jones took over when Van Natta stepped down in February 2010 and feels that somewhere along the way MySpace lost its direction and the things that made it appealing got lost in gimmicks and online gadgets. "My belief is that MySpace got very, very diverse in its offering, and didn't really have a specialized service that users understood," he said. "As we broadened our service over time, I think we lost some of the core strategic functions that MySpace offered early on that delighted its customers."

Looking to the future, he wants to reinvent the brand with a more focused strategy specifically promoting music and entertainment. These are the things which Jones feels were at the root of the site’s success I the first place. He says “With our recent relaunch as an entertainment destination for Gen Y, we introduced a much tighter focus, a significantly streamlined product and an updated technology platform.”

For more information on tech careers, visit http://www.techcareers.com/



By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a writer and blogger for Nexxt. She researches and writes about job search tactics, training, and topics