Obviously MySpace has very few friends left to alienate — Tom has long since moved on — but that hasn’t stopped it annoying the hell out of its few remaining fans by forcing through an update to its shiny new music discovery platform that’s swallowed their old blog content, with no guarantee it’s ever going to be retrievable. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan created Onesheet, a tool that enables musicians to create beautiful web presences in two minutes.
MySpace. Or is it Myspace. Or is it My______. Truth is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that MySpace has made increasingly bad decisions for too many years to every hope that they’ll become relevant again. Their latest bad decision shows how detached they are. → Read More
I’ve signed into Myspace using my Facebook account. They said you could use your Myspace ID, but apparently, my memory doesn’t stretch that far back. The site asks me to identify myself. Am I “curator?” A “venue?” A “brand?” Nope, but funny that all those choices are above “fan.” I decide to be more honest, and select “writer/journalist” because it’s the closest thing to “blogger.” → Read More
New Myspace made its debut back in September (when it made our own Drew Olanoff “want to hurl”) but the redesign has only been available to limited beta participants before now. Today, the next-generation version of the site is open to all, with registration possible using either your existing Myspace account, Facebook credentials or signing up as a brand new user. The launch came quietly, timed… → Read More
Unless Specific Media hits a home run with the new streaming music service it’s raising $50 million to pivot Myspace into, its bargain basement buy of the social network for just $35 million in 2011 could be a disaster. Slides attained by Business Insider shows Myspace will lose $43 million in 2012 on revenue of just $15 million. Yet somehow it thinks the notoriously tough music biz will save it. → Read More
Ok, folks, dust off your old web browsers, because Myspace is teasing a brand new design! Yes, the Justin Timberlake-backed whatever-it-is-now has slapped a new coat of paint on something that has already been sold and pushed to the side of the road. → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
eMarketer predicts that social network advertising will account for nearly 11% of all online ad spending in the United States by the end of this year. According to the research firm, US marketers will spend a little over $3 billion to advertise on social networking sites this year, up 55 percent from the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010.
eMarketer projects this number… → Read More
Whenever a company lays off 500 people, as MySpace did earlier this week when it gave half its employees walking papers, it generates quite a bit of anger and bitterness. The latest tip in our inbox from a dispirited former employee goes into a details about do-nothing managers who still have their jobs while all their underlings are now unemployed.
I won’t repeat the character assassinations… → Read More
An email from a reader claiming to be a MySpace employee about the layoffs today that left half of the company out of work. These things are part of life, but the bitterness, anger and feeling of betrayal are striking.
The email is below. → Read More
Things only seem to be getting worse for MySpace. Amid reports that the troubled social network is for sale by parent company News Corp., MySpace has just announced massive layoffs at the company. According to PaidContent, MySpace has cut 47 percent of its staff or nearly 500 employees.
Apparently, CEO Mike Jones said the cuts were necessary to “provide the company with a clear path for sustained… → Read More
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