The steep decline follows a further round of major
redundancies at the start of 2011 and the continued growth of
Facebook, which now has 30 million registered users in the UK.
According to the latest comScore figures, MySpace lost 10 million unique users
between January and February of this year, going form 73 million to 63
million in a matter of four weeks.
This time last year, when site began the first in a series of major
relaunches, MySpace attracted 95 million unique users.
Parent company News Corporation is reportedly still trying to sell off the
ailing social network – which had hopes to reinvent itself through its
streaming service, MySpace Music and its renewed focus on entertainment
content.
At the start of the year Mike Jones, MySpace’s chief executive announced
that the company was making 500 staff members redundant and slashing its
international operation to a skeleton staff.
The site, which is owned by News Corporation, has been struggling to keep
apace with Facebook for the last two years. However, despite having made a
major round of redundancies last year, which saw its US workforce reduced by
400 jobs to around 1,000 and its international operation reduced from 450 to
150 personnel, more cost cutting has been needed to make up for its big
financial losses.
A senior digital executive told The Telegraph: “MySpace lost $100 million in
the first quarter last year. To get it back on track is going to require a
massive investment – one which News Corporation it not prepared to make. It
has many other priorities to put its money into. So instead, it needs to
keep taking costs out of the business while it's still in its hands.”
In November 2010 Jones admitted
to The Telegraph, that MySpace had finished being a social network and
direct rival to Facebook.
Jones said the bold statement: “MySpace is a not a social network anymore. It
is now a social entertainment destination.”
The troubled site, which saw its UK audience halve to 3.3 million monthly
visitors in July 2010, is pinning its hopes of renewed success with a return
to its music and content roots.
Jones’s remarks just preceded Chase Carey’s, News Corporation’s chief
operating officer’s comments
that the company was actively considering selling off the asset, he
described publicly as a “problem”. This latest round of job cuts will prompt
further speculation that the site is being prepped for a sale.
Carey said a sale or partnership with internet giants such as Yahoo or AOL
were two or a number of options under consideration.
“There are opportunities here to do 20 things [with MySpace] but that doesn’t
mean you’re going to do any of the 20. If there’s something there that makes
sense you ought to think about it,” he said.
Carey, who has previously described MySpace’s losses as “neither acceptable or
sustainable”, refused to set a deadline for the social networking site to
return to profitability before it push ahead with a sale. “I’m not going to
break down [the number of] quarters,” he said. “It’s not years ... we need
to deal with this with urgency.”
Carey said the company’s engineers had done a “very good job” at redesigning
MySpace to help it better match market leaders Facebook and Twitter. He said
it would have been “pretty tough” to sell MySpace before the revamp.
News Corporation bought MySpace for $580m (£373m) in 2008. The asset was
briefly valued at $12bn when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo in
2007.
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