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MySpace Is In Far Worse Shape Than Its New Executives Thought (businessinsider.com)
24 points by jasonlbaptiste on June 13, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


Lets be honest. This is the spin that many new execs give especially after the previous executives were fired.

If things are worse than they appeared, then the new execs look that much better when things improve and don't look so bad if they fail. If they fail, they just argue that it couldn't be salvaged


"If you can't run that site with 750 people, you don't know how to run a business,"

No offense, but what the hell do they need even 750 people for?


It's almost certain that only a small fraction are actually technical people, because you don't need many tech people to keep such a site actually running.

But you do need people doing:

* Marketing/sales/advertising

* Finance/accounting

* Customer service

* Public relations

* Compliance

* etc., etc.

You also need at least some management to keep things running. And, at that size, human resources. And probably facilities/B&G people. And... well, let's just say I'm not surprised that there'd be 750 people.


There is 1500 employees now, they are thinking of cutting it down to 750.


And I thought that the 80+ people on digg were too much


I remember reading somewhere that Facebook has 400 employees (400 employees for 200 million members). The difference between MySpace and FB is striking.


No, Facebook has at least 700 employees (see source on Wikipedia for 11/08) and probably more like 800.


Note that that's still half of what MySpace employs now, according to the article.


It would be interesting to know how many of that workforce actually work in engineering type roles.

MySpace, being part of news corp, also probably has a large amount of people in traditional media content type roles. I think they have managed that side of the business well, they are certainly better at monetrization than facebook. It's just the state of there platform that lets them down.


Note: The NWS is News Corp's stock symbol, not the acronym for "not work-safe."


The article talks about New sales leadership. What exactly is there to sell?


Advertising


And lots of user data.




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