MySpace Lays Off 47% of Employees

tgtanman writes "CNN reports that MySpace has announced that it has laid off 500 employees, 47% of its total staff. From the article: 'MySpace's management kept most of the site's developers but gutted nearly every other job role, according to a staffer who survived the cuts ... "Today's tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability," CEO Mike Jones said in a written statement. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product."'"

Comments

Wait

[SilverHatHacker]

MySpace still had 500 employees?

Re:Wait

[Sensei Eggwoah]

That's a shock to me too. If you take all of Myspace's active users and subtract bands, self-promoters, and whores, I'd be surprised if you had 500 people left.

Re:Wait

[jbacon]

Even better! They had 1063.8297872340425531914893617021 employees, according to the summary.

Re:Wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You never learned about the sound a joke makes when you miss it entirely?

Re:Wait

[FreonTrip]

Becky, down in accounting. She's only 4' 11" and 95 pounds.

Re:Wait

[drinkypoo]

Great, now I can't be sure if I trolled the trolls or if I've been trolled while metatrolling.

Developers

[MrEricSir]

MySpace has developers? What do they do?!

Re:Developers

[Daniel Phillips]

MySpace has developers? What do they do?!

Same as they did before they went there from Yahoo.

Re:Developers

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Insensitive clod. Do you know how many patches we send upstream to the browser vendors to help them build rendering engines that can handle 25,000+ animated .gifs and 100+ flash embeds in a single page?

Never mind the time that we had to spend three weeks groveling through the dark underbelly of the Windows driver model, trying to figure out why users of certain realtek audio chipsets would suffer bluescreens when more than 14 streams of generic crunk rap were being fed to the software audio mixer simultaneously...

Re:Developers

[jamesh]

MySpace has developers? What do they do?!

Spend all day keeping their facebook statuses up to date.

Re:Developers

[tomhudson]

MySpace has developers? What do they do?!

Spend all day keeping their facebook statuses up to date.

Spend all day keeping their linkedin profiles up to date.

FTFY

Re:Developers

[Kvasio]

seek jobs

Re:Developers

[Edward Teach]

Ah, so that's how the new Facebook profile got so screwed up!

Re:Developers

[rtb61]

How about what does the CEO do, Mike Jones has 47% less people to manage, I wonder if they cut his salary by 47% for obviously being a failure.

This is not the only internet site that Newscorp bought and screwed up by strangling the chicken. Greed, desire to control users, need to force feed Newscorp propaganda and their attitude to truth versus lies 'meh' which is more profitable, means when it comes to the internet Newscorp will continue to fuck up (the truth always comes out and bites them on the arse).

MySpace?

[bradgoodman]

They're still around?! I thought I recognised "Tom" squeegying my windows at a red light the other day...

Re:and

[sortadan]

one can only hope the next iteration empowers the individual and gives them ownership and true control of their information.

New product?

[Shimmer]

What "new product"? MySpace is MySpace, isn't it? What else do they do? (Can't bear to RTFA and find out.)

Re:New product?

[93 Escort Wagon]

So, MySpace is the new product.

Welcome to the new space, same as the old space.

The funny thing is...

[TheRedDuke]

...I bet most of those ex-employees will be complaining about it on Facebook this evening.

Re:and

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm fairly sure that a rabble of serfs having their every detail picked over and monetized is way better for shareholder value...

Translation: preparing for sale

[rsborg]

From the article: 'MySpace's management kept most of the site's developers but gutted nearly every other job role, according to a staffer who survived the cuts

Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?

Re:Translation: preparing for sale

[PCM2]

Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?

That doesn't make sense. If you're trying to sell, you don't fire the employees first yourself -- what would be the point? Once you're out, you don't care how many employees the company has. Instead, you invite possible buyers to the office and make sure every single body is at a desk, working away like a busy little beaver on countless amazing things, making the company look like an incredible value and pushing the bidding price up. Then the investor walks away thinking, "Wow, they sure do great stuff there -- but they seem to have too many employees. If we buy the company, we can fire half of them and we'll end up with a real bargain!"

Re:Translation: preparing for sale

[publiclurker]

Sounds familiar. A friend of mine was kept on with a company as one of only three engineers when the company was sold. Apparently a plantation is more valuable if you throw in a few slaves to work it.

Re:Translation: preparing for sale

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That doesn't make sense. If you're trying to sell, you don't fire the employees first yourself -- what would be the point?

Because it fudges the profit numbers. Firing people doesn't hurt the revenue stream until a few quarters or even years down the road. But it significantly reduces costs which can provide a temporary bump in profitability. Buyout candidates have been doing this for longer than I've been alive and for some reason it still seems to fool potential buyers.

Re:Translation: preparing for sale

[IICV]

Buyout candidates have been doing this for longer than I've been alive and for some reason it still seems to fool potential buyers.

Because of what the grandparent poster was referring to -

Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?

By laying off half their workforce, MySpace is saying "Look - the people who are still here? They're dedicated and awesome developers. They're dedicated, because otherwise they would have left already; they're awesome, because otherwise we would have fired them (after all, we have no reason to keep on chaff at this point). Buy us, and you'll get a pre-screened workforce of awesome and dedicated developers, which is worth quite a lot."

Companies spend a lot of money trying to hire competent people. What MySpace is doing right now is saying "here's the cream of our crop, ready to be slurped up if you buy us".

Re:Two words:

[cusco]

Actually Ah-Oh-heLL bought Time-Warner in one of those amusing quirks of speculators driving share price far beyond anything reasonable. AOL management, in their one and only lucid moment, realized that they had best take the money and buy some actual assets with it or their stock options were going to be utterly worthless after the impending crash (a crash that was obvious to everyone who didn't work on Wall Street).

Facebook Button on MySpace?

[The Yuckinator]

There is a "Connect with Facebook" button on the front page of myspace.com

It blew my mind

How's that working out, Rupert?

[Voline]

NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[al0ha]

Yeah, he's a *real* business genius isn't he? This is what cracks me up about really rich people and their view of those who have not done as well in life. According to people like Murdoch, it is because they have worked harder than all of us and are much more savvy; but the truth is it is because good fortune (luck) has graced them in life. I'm not sure of how many potential *Murdochs* there are out there, but I am sure there are hundreds, just like all the talented people unveiled by shows like American Idol who to that point had not made it, only because they had not gotten lucky yet.

Nobody makes it big without a substantial helping of good luck. Not lotto winners, World Series of Poker winners, nor people like Murdoch and Trump.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well

According to Reuters he did did pretty well:

Initially, the deal paid for itself after Google Inc inked a three-year $900 million search advertising deal in 2006.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is something a lot of young tech geeks don't realize. Companies come, they make a profit and then either innovate and develop new products and make more profit, or die. That's how a free market works.

MySpace launched their service, made profit, didn't innovate and died within a few years time. And that's all right. Google is lasting a lot longer because they keep innovating. Facebook? Well, we'll see what happens. It ultimately depends on their ability to innovate.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[c6gunner]

Nobody makes it big without a substantial helping of good luck.

Since luck has no physical property or defined quantity, that phrase is largely meaningless. It would be equally accurate to say that nobody makes it big without a substantial helping of ether.

The one thing we do know is that a large percentage of those who "make it big" through no effort of their own end up making it small again, with an equal amount of effort. Keeping your money is just as hard as making it, if not more so.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[Edmund Blackadder]

It seems they might not have gotten the full 900 mil. See

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-on-900-million-google-deal/19224196/

Also one has to wonder how much it cost to run myspace all these years. I don't think we will ever know for sure whether Murdoch made or lost money with Myspace. The myspace finances were not separated out in the statements. In the 2010 statement the group in which myspace belonged (named appropriately as "other") suffered around a $500 million loss. However that group included other businesses.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[icebraining]

Since luck has no physical property or defined quantity, that phrase is largely meaningless.

No, it's not. Luck is probabilities. The phrase means that making it big depends on variables outside of the person's control, and that effort doesn't correlate well with success. Whether it's true or not, I can't say.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[IICV]

According to people like Murdoch, it is because they have worked harder than all of us and are much more savvy; but the truth is it is because good fortune (luck) has graced them in life. I'm not sure of how many potential *Murdochs* there are out there, but I am sure there are hundreds, just like all the talented people unveiled by shows like American Idol who to that point had not made it, only because they had not gotten lucky yet.

Hundreds? If Rupert Murdoch is one in a million, there's seven thousand people who are just as capable of achievement as he was out there. It just turns out that most of those potential new Rupert Murdochs aren't going to get the opportunities he had - not everyone can be the son of Keith Murdoch, the owner of an already successful newspaper empire.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[BobGregg]

>> people DO make it big without luck, i.e. I don't think Steve Jobs / Bill Gates were
>> as lucky as people on American Idol,

You should read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. His thesis is that people make it to extraordinary levels often by virtue of having had extraordinary chances that others haven't had. For example, as a very young man Bill Gates had opportunities to get computer time that were available to very few others at his age. That's a very relevant kind of "luck" - a contributing circumstance provided by others, that he would not have been able to provide for himself.

Re:How's that working out, Rupert?

[Xyrus]

Current most likely way to become rich: Lucky sperm.

Hard work won't make you rich. Only the naive believe that.

That's not to say hard work is pointless. Hard work will still (usually) give you a comfortable life. But hard work alone won't ever make you rich. It just doesn't work that way. I can tell you for a fact that a single mom working three jobs to support her kids is working harder than most CEOs in this country, but she isn't going to get rich doing it.

You need to know People, and have a lot of luck. Even if you are the first with the Next Big Thing(tm), it may languish in obscurity for years or decades without the right resources and connections.

But if the luck thing isn't working out then try being an asshole. That really seems to move people up the corporate ladder...or gets them elected to congress.

Take care of the mice, what else?

[denzacar]

It is a little know fact that MySpace got its name from a typing error.

It was supposed to be called Mice Pace - based on their innovative approach of running millions of mice over millions of keyboards in order to create a sample of "perfect code".
It was a variation of the idea with monkeys and typewriters - mice were cheaper to get and easier to scale up.

The result is the site we all know as MySpace. They could never get the Complete Works of Shakespeare out of the mice either.
But they did get half a Justin Bieber song once. Thousands of mice had to be put to death after that.

Path to profitability through layoffs?

[Kaz Kylheku]

How exactly does MySpace make money?

Does it really have a path to profitabillity?

This is the problem with many companies

[rudy_wayne]

it has laid off 500 employees, 47% of its total staff.

Which means it had 1064 employees before the layoff. What in the world could they possible need more than a thousand people for? And why are now able to run with only half that many?
If you can't run MySpace with 100 people -- and that's being generous -- there's something seriously wrong. This is another case of "Somebody (in this case Rupert Murdoch) gave us a lot of money, so we can afford to hire a shit load of people regardless of whether or not we actually need them.

Re:This is the problem with many companies

[MogNuts]

When I first saw it, I remember thinking that it *only* has 1000 employees? I find that pretty amazing to have so *little* employees.

Think about it. It at one time (only 2-3 years ago) was one of the most popular, most trafficked sites around. All those those data centers, servers, coding (yes it was awful but code doesn't create itself), arrangements with bands and music licenses. Hell its bread and butter was to need data mining analysts and advertising campaign analysts. They should have a department of 100 each!

Re:This is the problem with many companies

[rudy_wayne]

When I first saw it, I remember thinking that it *only* has 1000 employees? I find that pretty amazing to have so *little* employees.

Think about it. It at one time (only 2-3 years ago) was one of the most popular, most trafficked sites around. All those those data centers, servers, coding (yes it was awful but code doesn't create itself), arrangements with bands and music licenses. Hell its bread and butter was to need data mining analysts and advertising campaign analysts. They should have a department of 100 each!

I'm not aware of MySpace ever owning any data centers. They almost certainly paid someone else to handle that and had a few employees monitoring things. And it certainly doesn't take a thousand people to code a shitty site and make a few deals with bands and mine data and create marketing campaigns. Unless of course somebody gave you a butt load of money and you aren't the least bit concerned with how you spend it. We see how well THAT worked out.

Re:This is the problem with many companies

[dachshund]

And why are now able to run with only half that many?

Who says they are? In my experience, when a firm lays off half of their employees, the other half aren't far behind.

Re:This is it!

[froggymana]

That will happen right after the Year of the Linux desktop....

GeoMySpaceCities

[rueger]

Am I alone in thinking that MySpace was Geocities for the new millennium?

Re:Two words:

[kiddygrinder]

because your post was 15 times harder to read to the end

Re:I gave up on MySpace years ago

[boxwood]

giving up on myspace is soooo last decade man. All the cool kids are giving up on facebook now.