There is always an element of the confessional about interviewing people, but I really felt like a priest when I interviewed MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this week. DeWolfe was keynoting San Francisco’s FailCon conference and our conversation naturally focused on failure – and particularly, of course, the meteoric failure of MySpace.
This the second in a weeklong series of interviews about failure. Yesterday, Vinod Khosla confessed to me that he had experienced many more failures than successes in his seemingly illustrious career. → Read More
Rupert Murdoch withstood intense grilling at News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting today, which focused largely on the phone-hacking scandal that is causing such an upset in the company’s financials and leadership. But among other things, Murdoch owned up to the debacle that has been Myspace.
“I made a huge mistake,” he said. “We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way. All of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company.” Except for himself, of course. The fact that it was a mistake and a mismanaged one at that is not news to the rest of the world, but the unmixed apology for the billion-dollar boondoggle reflects how low recent events have brought the once-proud news giant. → Read More
Myspace savior Specific Media laid off 8% of its staff yesterday, about 50 people. Those laid off were mostly Myspace employees, according to one source, presumably eagerly awaiting their severance package; “The people that [sic] got let go were celebrating because Specific Media doesn’t have a clue what to do.”
In the past three months Specific Media had gone from the excitement of new acquisition smell to post partum depression it seems like, recently scaling back this summer’s grand Myspace relaunch plans because of unfavorable progress. → Read More
Myspace owner-Specific Media has laid of a percentage of its staff today, we’ve confirmed with the company. Specific Media said these layoffs took place in sales and operating areas, and was part of a consolidation effort to eliminate redundancies between the two businesses. As Specific Media says in a statement: The company is consolidating forces to ensure greater alignment between its workforce and the direction in which it’s headed. Specific Media says that “less than 8%” of the company’s employees were laid off. Specific Media has about 750 employees, so around 50-60 employees may have been let go.
Apart from Myspace, Specific Media is an ad technology company that aims to help drive viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers. The company allows marketers to buy digital ads across the Web, TV, online video, mobile platforms. Of course, you may know that Specific Media (along with Justin Timberlake) bought Myspace earlier this year from News Corp. for around $35 million. → Read More
This is just a guess, but I’d bet money that Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz probably feel like their heads are going to explode. Anyone on the G+ team who really cares about G+ is probably getting very little sleep, and are annoying their friends and family with their one-track G+ minds. There’s been such an amazing amount of feedback, the Google+ team can’t help but be overwhelmed–and what we see is just on the site and in the press. Imagine what’s coming into that ‘send feedback’ inbox that’s at the bottom of every G+ page?
At MySpace I tried to digest that “inbox” and “community” by myself, and that worked pretty well for a few years. It was a little easier back then, but today’s G+ users are an entirely different breed. There are a ton of early adopters, technologits on G+ — and they’ve all been through the social networking ringer before. G+ users are offering powerpoint slideshows, illustrated screen mockups and long-winded essays on what needs to happen. There is genuine, high-quality thinking going on in the “free advice” that G+ is receiving from the global community. How can the G+ team cut through the noise and decide what’s important? (Especially when there’s some really high quality noise being directed Google’s way.)
Here’s a few things I’d do right now, if I were Google. → Read More
Gotta love Tom Anderson. Newly reinvigorated by the launch of Google+, “MySpace Tom” has become a social power user (and regular TechCrunch contributor!). As a man at the forefront of the early days of the social wars, he’s obviously full of information. And today he decided to share a bit more. This time, it’s a fascinating story about the time Microsoft, not Google, was about to land the MySpace ad deal.
In a comment on (where else) Google+, Anderson tells the story in response to my most recent post about the Google/Facebook war before Google+. Based on a Quora thread, I noted that the 2006 search/ad deal Google signed with MySpace (Fox Interactive Media) may have been the true kick-off of hostilities between Google and Facebook. As a result, Microsoft signed Facebook — which later led to the famous investment. → Read More
Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.
Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. → Read More
You know what isn’t cool? $35 million isn’t cool … So in a move that makes truth stranger than fiction, Justin Timberlake, who played Facebook president Sean Parker in a movie called The Social Network, has taken an ownership stake in a real life social network as part of the Myspace sale. → Read More
Myspace CEO Mike Jones just sent out this mass internal email and press release confirming the company’s sale to Specific Media earlier this morning. Kara Swisher is reporting that the sale was for $35 million.
From what I’m hearing it’s been a rocky morning at the social network, which was bought by Newscorp in 2005 for $580 million. → Read More
With reports of social network Myspace about to sell for ~$30 million, the tech world eagerly awaits the HBS study for why the service, which was bought in 2006 by Newscorp for $580 million and was at some point valued at $1.5 billion (a quote in a Business Week article referred to it as “one of the best acquisitions ever”) ultimately failed. → Read More
We’ve confirmed the rumors of Myspace layoffs with our own inside source; From what I’m hearing the company expects to lay off at least 150 of its around 400 employees tomorrow (37.5% of its staff). According to the source, another group of around 150 employees will be put on a transition plan, where they will still be laid off but can work with pay for a few weeks while they search for another job.
Myspace cut around 47% of its staff back in January and these new layoffs come as Myspace is preparing itself for a sale, which we’re hearing will be signed tomorrow and announced on Friday. While there are multiple rumors circling regarding who exactly will be buying the beleaguered social network, the names being tossed around include a bidding group fronted by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, Buzzmedia, and even LivingSocial. → Read More
Sad news for some karaoke fans out there: MySpace Karaoke — a feature that launched back in 2008 — is no more.
A message now appears on the feature’s former home that states, “Karaoke has been discontinued…If you have any questions, please contact us by clicking the “Contact Myspace” link on Myspace help at http://www.myspace.com/help”. A MySpace spokesperson further confirms the news and says that any remaining balances of the pre-paid service beyond June 15th will be refunded to users. → Read More
Check out the graph in my March post about MySpace’s free fall in usage. After a long decline you’d expect a site like MySpace to plateau and find some sort of stable group of users. Instead, all the data says their decline is actually accelerating.
So I was surprised to see unique visitors level off over the last two months, according to Comscore. And by level off, I mean a straight line floor at about 62 million worldwide monthly visitors and 37 million U.S. visitors. Look at that chart. It’s just weird. Uniques should have fallen another 8 million or so. Instead, MySpace held the line.
Curious, I dug a little deeper into their stats. Not good. → Read More
Back in 2008 MySpace was on a roll. They racked up $900 million in revenue and the company was still growing. But a year later top execs started to bail (the smart ones went early). Within two months cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe was gone.
We’ve gotten a copy of the confidential MySpace pitch book that parent company News Corp. has distributed to potential buyers. Notably, that pitch book doesn’t include any historical financial or user data about MySpace at all. Everything is projected out and forward looking, and even then it’s bleak.
Revenue for fiscal 2011, ending June 30, 2011, is expected to be just $109 million. Expenses for the year are projected to be $274 million, and the company will lose a whopping $165 million for the 12 month period. That’s after massive waves of layoffs, although I expect much of the costs of the layoffs are included up front in 2011 expenses. → Read More
“Tish Whitcraft recently joined MySpace as SVP of Customer Care responsible for delivering a world-class user experience to the 250 million + MySpace users,” the company said in mid 2008 when Whitcraft, a seasoned big company executive, joined the team. Now, three years later Whitcraft joins countless other MySpace execs, and about 190 million of those 250 million users, and leaves.
She’s joining Tagged, a social network that has somehow survived, and even thrived, in a Facebook world. Her first day at Tagged as Chief Customer Officer is on Monday morning.
Part of her job will be what CEO Greg Tseng is calling “onshoring” of a bunch of customer service jobs. Fifty customer service reps working with Tagged in India as contractors will be let go, and the company will be replacing them with new full time employee hires in San Francisco. → Read More
Between January and February 2011, says Comscore, worldwide unique visitors to MySpace declined by a staggering 14.4% from 73 million visitors to 63 million visitors. It’s about half of the audience they had a year ago.
Everyone knows MySpace traffic is going the wrong way, but the accelerating decline (and big financial losses) is a serious problem. Parent company News Corp. is in the middle of a sale process, and everyone from venture firms to private equity firms to operating companies are taking a look. “It’s like slowing down at the scene of an accident,” says one person with knowledge of the discussions, “everyone wants to take a look at how bad things have become.”
The problem with negative growth is that predictive modeling has to be thrown out the window. And an accelerating decline in audience suggests that MySpace won’t be stabilizing soon. Right now, people are fleeing as fast as they can from the site. → Read More
Former VP of Product at Myspace Todd Leeloy and Myspace Product Manager Joe Munoz have launched a semantic tagging network and link curation service today called Tagging Robot. Tagging Robot currently crawls your Facebook newsfeed and separates your links based on topics, as well as giving you relevant topics data for each link.
Tagging Robot uses NLP and Machine Learning to build users a topic centered profile, and uses your Facebook Interests and Social Graph to populate the page. What you immediately see on your profile is a list of recommended links (based on followed topics), a list of all links shared recently by your network and your favorites (which you track by clicking the <3 symbol next to each link). → Read More
Remember MySpace Music? It was supposed to put online music streaming on the the right track. But with all the layoffs, shrinking audience and turmoil at parent MySpace, MySpace Music is singing the blues. According to comScore, only 17 million people in the U.S. visited MySpace Music in January, 2011, which is down 46 percent from the previous year. Pandora is now bigger on the Web, with an estimated 20.3 million monthly U.S. visitors.
Today, MySpace Music president Courtney Holt is stepping down. He joined two years ago from MTV. But with MySpace itself on the wane and Rupert Murdoch looking to unload it, MySpace Music can no longer hold its own. → Read More
Songtrust (founded in October, 2010) and Myspace Music this morning announced a partnership to bring Songtrust’s music publishing management services to the social network’s (vast) audience of DIY songwriters and bands.
A division of Downtown Music, Songtrust’s digital rights management solution empowers indie songwriters and artists to manage their music publishing and related rights. → Read More
I recently over heard someone saying of MySpace – “It used to be dirty, underground, seedy and successful. Now it’s prom at a private school.” The company is struggling to reinvent itself. But traffic continues to plunge. Comscore says they had 80 million worldwide unique visitors in December. They had around 90 million in October before the big redesign. A year ago they had 120 million uniques, says Comscore.
So it’s no surprise they let half their staff go, some 500 people, in early January.
Another, smaller, social network has apparently found a say to be relevant in a Facebook world. San Francisco based Tagged logged revenues of over $30 million in 2010 and are profitable with a staff of 50. We reported on that in late 2010 when I interviewed founder Greg Tseng. They’ve been profitable for the last three years. → Read More
