Last week in the London Telegraph, I saw this headline:
“MySpace: is this the beginning of the end?
The news that MySpace is set to sack a majority of its international workforce, outside of its headquarters in the US, should set alarm bells ringing.”
Beginning of the end?
I love you Telegraph, but for MySpace, that was a long time ago. When was the beginning of the end? That’s tough to answer because the former king of social networking has had so many amazing failures over the past three years.
When Facebook said that anyone could be on Facebook, and there was a mass exodus: that was a pretty big nail in the coffin too.
I wrote about MySpace last February. At the time, they had execs dropping like all of those birds that have been dropping dead out of the sky this month. They had spent most of 2009 working on a project called Remaking MySpace which was an attempt at totally rebranding the company. It failed and ended with several high ranking execs leaving (including CEO Owen Van Natta).
Let’s not forget this past fall when Facebook and MySpace decided to work in collaboration. It was announced in November that they were adding Facebook Connect to MySpace. The announcement was made by MySpace CEO Mike Jones along with Facebook VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Dan Rose.
VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing? But where was Zuck?
Or number 2 in command? Or number 3? Or 4 or 5?
That would be like the president of another country visiting the White House and being welcomed to America by the White House family dog.
The fact that the CEO of MySpace and only a VP from Facebook made the announcement did not go unnoticed. It was an irony that if ever there needed to be closure to who had won the social networking war, there it was.
Later this week, MySpace is set to announce they are firing roughly half of their entire staff. Most of those firings coming from international employees.
To show how hard they’ve fallen, in 2006, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore wrote citing Jordan Rohan from the National Bank of Canada who predicted MySpace would be worth $10-20 billion in three years (2009).
jrb
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The article saying how much MySpace would potentially be worth:
Josh Benner 