inthemix | International News | MySpace slashes more jobs, firing two thirds of all international staff

It was just last week that ITM reported the news that the US home of social networking hub MySpace was laying off one third of all its US staff, describing the previous level of employees as “bloated”. Well it would seem as though the fading giant won’t be stopping there, with an announcement today that the company is preparing to drop the axe on two thirds of its global staff.

In a press sheet released today MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta explained the company’s new “restructuring” plans for its international arms. “Our goal to tap into as many international markets as possible drove us to create too many offices around the globe, and with them came inefficiencies…Our proposal would reduce MySpace’s international staff from 450 employees to approximately 150 employees and close at least 4 of our offices outside the United States. Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace’s international operations,” Van Natta stated.

The offices under threat from the proposed plan include those based in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain. The web watchers over at TechCrunch picked up on these locations, pointing out that these territories had already lost considerable ground to MySpace’s usurper Facebook. Complementing these findings with some particularly telling graphs of Facebook’s superiority in these territories, TechCrunch made it clear that there can be no doubt that MySpace is slipping in Facebook’s wake. “MySpace’s growth has been stagnating for quite some time now. Worldwide monthly page views for MySpace declined from 47.4 billion a year ago to 38 billion in April, a 20% drop. In that same period Facebook grew from 44 billion to 87 billion, a roughly 100% increase,” Leena Rao of TechCrunch said.

Clearly those figures speak volumes of the decline in popularity for MySpace, but will these drastic job cuts be enough to save the ailing site? Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end for MySpace?

campbellt says...

on June 24th, 2009

So who cares, It's a tough time and the company has to make money. If it required cutting your staff levels so be it! It's a business at the end of the day and if it's not making money there's no point in running it!

DJ MooseKnuckle says...

on June 24th, 2009

You wouldn't say that if it was your company making people redundant and your head came up on the chopping block. Try and have a little empathy. It's not easy watching your co-workers be walked out the door.