MySpace goes into rapid retreat/embraces its future

By June 23 2009, 10:51 am 6 Comments
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There’s carnage at MySpace. Almost 800 jobs cut within a week and the closed sign is being hung up around the world. It looks like today we are seeing the social media map being reshaped.

Last week MySpace laid off 420 staff in its US offices. Today it has cut a further 300 internationally and is closing down a host of offices as it retrenches and faces up to its place in the world.

In the new world order of MySpace, London, Berlin, and Sydney will be the primary regional hubs for MySpace as offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain get the chop as has Travis Katzis, the MySpace SVP and MD, who is leaving, having grown staff around the world from two to more than 400.

The cuts have come as new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has been given the job of re-envisioning the social networking site and helping it “operate as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up”.

That has come against a backdrop of MySpace usage falling rapidly away. In the last year the number of minutes spent on the site has fallen by 31% (although it remains top for video) while Facebook soared 700%.

MySpace has lost its place as a general social networking site and these tough cuts are obvious signs that it has accepted this.

Where MySpace is strong, is in music and video or entertainment more generally. As a place for promoting new music and bands, as well as movies, MySpace has its niche, but is that enough?

I saw a headline last week on Adage, which posed this question neatly: Can Bruno (as in Sasha Baron Cohen) save MySpace? Or “MeinSpace” as the campy Austrian character calls it.

‘Bruno’ is another movie that has close ties with MySpace, which has a special MeinSpace.com hosted page.

The story detailed how ‘Bruno’ was only part of MySpace efforts to forge deep ties with the entertainment industry and major studios.

Something seems to be working. Bruno has 330,000-odd friends on MySpace, but only 31,500 on Facebook and around 14,000 followers on Twitter (who are these people?) where his username is @brunovassup.

For MySpace this is retrenchment, but clearly the right thing to do and from its perspective it is clearly better for it to embrace this rather simply try to continue to compete as a more general social networking site such as Facebook.

This suggests several things. There are a whole bunch of special interest gaps out there.

Fake profiles and anonymity have always been the order of the day on MySpace. As some have said before this was like Twitter in the early days, but increasingly Twitter has become more like Facebook. People have ditched their fake names and more and more only want to connect people who only have their real names.

I started out as GordonM before changing my username to my actual name. It makes sense.

The fakery and anonymity means that MySpace is taking on increasingly the properties of niche interest social networking sites. If you are a cyclist for instance you probably go to Bikeradar or a runner you go to Runner’s World. And when you do you are likely to be a member of them in addition to broader sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

This gives us a world where we have a number of top level broad interest sites (like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) and more special interest sites (both international and local) of which a retrenched MySpace appears to be one of.

 

[Twitter]

  • rick sareen

    Fair comment. But I also say Facebook and Twitter will go the same way. Two big reasons: new tech will supplant the current one and force it to adapt or die. Adapting usually means finding your niche as you learn you are not all things to all men.
    And also, people will get bored with this stuff. At the end of the day none of it is very satisfying. As many have observed, user behaviour around email, facebook and the like is akin to obsessive drug use or ocd in some people. 140 characters is a gimmick or a speciality, not a way of communicating.
    All things must pass and tomorrow will bring a new dawn. Add your own cliche or pearl ;-)

  • rick sareen

    Fair comment. But I also say Facebook and Twitter will go the same way. Two big reasons: new tech will supplant the current one and force it to adapt or die. Adapting usually means finding your niche as you learn you are not all things to all men.
    And also, people will get bored with this stuff. At the end of the day none of it is very satisfying. As many have observed, user behaviour around email, facebook and the like is akin to obsessive drug use or ocd in some people. 140 characters is a gimmick or a speciality, not a way of communicating.
    All things must pass and tomorrow will bring a new dawn. Add your own cliche or pearl ;-)
    rick sareen

  • Gordon Macmillan

    You have a point. People get bored and this is all very new. We have seen sites fall and rise very quickly (Yahoo/Friends Reunited/MySpace), but i really think that some will survive.

    Google is a good example. Of all the early search engines it has remained. Maybe Facebook will as well. Maybe Twitter too.

  • Jack Wallington

    “adapt or die” is a good phrase for all web properties – for all technology in fact. As technology improves and it becomes easier to ‘do stuff’ with your website, you have to continually adapt to stay ahead.

    Facebook has continued to adapt itself, not everything has been perfect, but it is a good innovator and experimenter which in itself means it stands a better chance. Facebook Connect extends the Facebook brand beyond the network’s boundaries. What does it mean in the long term? Who knows, but it’s definitely working at the moment.

    Twitter’s openness is its key to success IMO – the ‘closed’ network approach has always been one of my biggest bugbears with the internet and Twitter has been open out of the gate.

  • Rick Sareen

    I agree with you Jack about Twitter being open. That does make a difference.
    However I suspect that many of these technologies, if they do not die or get absorbed by another, will specialise. An analogy is CB radio. When it came out it was touted as something for all motor users. And for a time it was sort of fashionable to have CB. It soon became for young men with souped up Astras and then finally settled down as the house comms channel for truckers. And very good it is at that.

    Twitter is great for short, real time communication with a specific group of people and it can link with other technologies. I think that’s the start point. But for everyone? A great panacea? Nah.

  • Gordon Macmillan

    Let me say…I agree with Jack also. Openness is key.

    Whatever happened to CB? I also agree with your point Rick about Twitter is not for everyone. I’ve said that before. It works really well as a channel for work for me and maybe that is why it is dominated by digital types, journalists and errrm celebs (who are just famous media types right?). Then like tabloid readers you have those who like to read what Katie Price is saying on Twitter, but have no interest in tweeting themselves, which is borne out by the research (most tweets come from a small number of users).

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