James Delahunty
11 Jan 2011 13:24
Social entertainment website MySpace.com is dropping almost half of its staff in an ongoing transformation of its services.
Once the King of social networking, MySpace lost out to the phenomenal growth of Facebook over the past few years. News Corporation gave MySpace a limited time frame to turn around its loss-making services. The result was a relaunch as a "social entertainment" site aimed at "Generation Y", which would be users aged 35 and younger.
The "restructuring" affects about 500 employees, representing 47 percent of the company. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product," Chief Executive Mike Jones said.
News Corp has repeatedly indicated that it is open to selling the relaunched MySpace service to any interested parties, but reports just last week suggested that there are no ongoing talks.