MySpace zet 47% van al het personeel op straat

Het gerucht ging al wat langer rond maar nu is het toch zo ver, MySpace moet zo’n 500 man, 47% van het complete personeeldbestand, ontslaan. Het nieuws kwam vanmorgen naar buiten op het moment dat alle ogen gericht waren op Verizon’s iPhone nieuws.

Het sociale netwerk zegt deze stap te moeten maken om “het bedrijf te voorzien van een duidelijk pad voor duurzame groei en winstgevendheid“. Ze benadrukken dat het geen weerspiegeling is van de perstaties van het grote redesign van vorig jaar, dat is tot nu toe een succes geweest.

Het is de tweede ontslagronde van het sociale netwerk in 18 maanden tijd. In juni 2009, toen Owen Van Natta nog CEO was werd er ook al zo’n 300 man op straat gezet. Destijds werd er als reden opgegeven dat de ontlagronde ervoor moest zorgen dat de site weer veel efficiënter moet gaan werken om zowel structureel als financieel vooruit te gaan. Teksten die erg veel lijken op de aankondiging die vandaag naar buiten is gebracht. Hieronder de volledige statement zoals naar buiten gebracht door MySpace CEO Mike Jones.

“Today Myspace is implementing a significant organizational restructuring that will result in a 47 percent staff reduction across all divisions globally and impact about 500 employees. With our recent relaunch as an entertainment destination for Gen Y, we introduced a much tighter focus, a significantly streamlined product and an updated technology platform.

In international, Myspace, Inc. will be entering into strategic local partnerships in the UK, Germany and Australia to manage advertising sales and content. In the UK, Myspace will enter into a strategic alliance with .Fox Networks, with whom we have successfully partnered with in many international territories.  Details about Australia and Germany are currently being finalized.  Myspace will retain a core, dedicated international team to work with partners in order to ensure users, content partners and advertisers continue to be served.

Today’s tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability. These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product.  The new organizational structure will enable us to move more nimbly, develop products more quickly, and attain more flexibility on the financial side.  We are also committed to rebuilding the company with an entrepreneurial culture and an emphasis on technical innovation.

While it’s still early days, the new Myspace is trending positively and the good news is we have already seen an uptick in returning and new users. Since the worldwide rollout of the new Myspace, there have been more than 3.3 million new Profiles created. We also introduced Topic Pages, which connect users to entertainment-focused content from news sites and blogs all over the Web. Over 134,000 Topic Pages have been created since the introduction of the new Myspace. There has also been a boost in viral activities, with over 10 million social actions and 90 million “follows” within the Hubs and Topics categories.  In addition, we are seeing Curators driving a lot of the engagement on our site.  Users who “friend” one of our Curators increased their frequency of visits by 35 percent.  Lastly, we have already seen a rise of four percent in mobile users just between November to December, now totaling over 22 million.“