Myspace: I'll be back?!
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MySpace?s death spiral: insiders say it?s due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft ? Scobleizer
I’ve been watching the death spiral MySpace is in for a while. Back in December I interviewed CEO Mike Jones onstage at LeWeb. Back then I thought maybe MySpace could pull it out, but since then I’ve learned the MySpace “plane” that’s in a death spiral has increased its velocity — in the wrong direction. The problem was, as Myspace started losing to Facebook, they knew they needed to make major changes. But they didn’t have the programming talent to really make huge changes and the infrastructure they bet on made it both tougher to change, because it isn’t set up to do the scale of 100 million users it needed to, and tougher to hire really great entrepreneurial programmers who could rebuild the site to do interesting stuff. Here, let’s go back and watch the video with YFrog’s CEO, Jack Levin.The category of News Corp's business that includes MySpace lost $174 million in the fourth quarter, worse than the $136 million it lost in the same period last year, the parent company said during its earnings call this morning. But News Corp plans to stick with the beleaguered social networking site, the company said, and a "major overhaul" will be finished in a few months. MySpace has been struggling for years to remain relevant alongside more trendy sites like Facebook and Twitter. Worse, its lucrative advertising deal with Google will expire or be renegotiated on less favorable terms at the end of this month, News Corp said. News Corp bought MySpace as part of a $580 million deal in 2005. It described MySpace at the time as "the leading lifestyle portal for networking online," and claimed it was the fifth most popular site on the Internet and was home to more than 8% of all Internet advertising.
MySpace Bleeding Money; News Corp Promises 'Overhaul' Soon
MySpace’s new slogan, and the theme of their new product strategy, will be “Discover and be Discovered,” we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. This will be their differentiating factor from Facebook, execs told employees at an all hands meeting last Thursday. The meeting was called in the wake of the firing of CEO Owen Van Natta and the related promotions of Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn to co-presidents. The meeting, which was held in the courtyard of MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters to accomodate 600 or employees, was also broadcast to other offices around the world.
MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery”
For months, we've been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace's proposed redesign and rebranding. Tonight's report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site's hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we've known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site's tagline is expected to change to "Discover and Be Discovered." But is that really enough to bring users back?
Open Thread: Can MySpace Really Make a Comeback?
Twitter made news today for announcing that it now sees an average of 50 million status messages posted each day . A sharp growth curve indicates that activity on Twitter could grow much higher in the short term future. Good old MySpace says it can't be counted out yet, though.
Twitter Just Passed MySpace in Number of Status Updates
Rupert Murdoch's $580 million MySpace purchase has outlived not only its utility, but has also finally hit its expiration date. That last step came with the announcement this afternoon that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive of the company. This was nine months after he joined the Los Angeles-based venture. It's circling the drains, if you ask me.
MySpace Is Far From Dead - SVW
J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.