Is this the beginning of the end for Myspace?
Yesterday Myspace made 30% of it’s employees redundant. And, whilst I sympathize with those employees who are now wandering around employment websites, desperately trying find a job, this day had to come.
There is no getting away from the fact that Myspace is over. And it’s been over for a long time. Unfortunately for the sacked employees Myspace management were, and are, too stupid to see the writing on the wall.
Take a look at the vacuous words of Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta,
Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company. I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.
Bloated. What a lovely way to describe your employees just before you fire them.
Van Natta, you are a short sighted fool. More than that, your attitude to your employees is contemptible.
Myspace has never centered anything on it’s users. Never. Myspace is, was, and always will be a click farm, designed to artificially inflate metrics to convince equally short sighted advertisers to part with cash.
Clicks don’t mean anything. That’s a lesson that Van Natta and his team of sub par middle managers are learning.
Blogs make money because they attract attention and the successful ones hold that attention.
Myspace loses money because it’s users don’t pay attention to anything since there is nothing within its walls to warrant that attention. Traffic quality is non existent, the advertisers smell the decay and leave, and then, finally, the users leave one by one before the sinking ship finally hits the bottom.
This isn’t the beginning of the end for Myspace. That started a long time ago.
Question is, who’s next?
Social networks that serve a genuinely useful purpose will survive. Those that provide an ever expanding wasteland of junk and refuse will not.
Twitter is safe. It’s only threats are it’s increasingly worrying levels of spam that it has yet to combat effectively and the possibility of it being purchased by an unpopular leviathan like Microsoft that would destroy it’s credibility overnight, sending users running away in disgust.
Facebook, on the other hand, is following Myspace into oblivion like a lemming that has just watched his friend run headlong off the top of the cliff.
When will the end of Myspace take place? Sooner than many think. And, if my predictions are correct, Facebook will follow between 12 and 18 months later.
My opinion of Facebook may be unpopular with it’s fans but, and I’m pretty sure of this, it’s day of reckoning will come. Sooner than many are willing to believe.
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Ashley Morgan is a UK jazz trumpet player and owner of independent record label 447 Records.
Ashley Morgan is the trumpet player with Enormous.
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Ashley, your observations are harsh, sobering, and spot on.
You nailed why social networking as a whole is failing. It’s incredibly confusing as to why these ‘new’ entrepreneurs continue to sink into oblivion. I mean, the history has already been written…Excite, AOL, Yahoo. While each, except Excite, are continuing to desperately hold onto some users, their numbers have staggeringly dropped. They have all devolved, as you said, into “click farms”.
Obviously, social networking is something that people want. But, every popular platform seems to devolve into a cess pool of spammers, grammatically challenged morons, and those that simply get tired of the latter two and leave.
The golden crown still awaits a king of social networks. I believe that we’ve only seen the court jesters so far.
Something we “web-people” often forget is that there is a big difference between a good website and a good company. Users are an important thing in a web company, absolutely crucial, but if you can’t figure out how to convert theese users, there isn’t much point of them returning. Not twitter, nor facebook or any other company since the cellphone-industry, has figured out how to make money of of other peoples conversations, and the cellphone-model does not work on the internet.
Before twitter can figure out how to make money, i wouldn’t bet on their survival, nor facebooks.
so what do you think myspace management should have done to keep their employees?
Despite making no real profit, sites like Twitter tend to get acquired by the big names eventually e.g Google. YouTube, as far as I know, still makes no profit, at least not a significant one. Yet it continues to grow and grow. Interesting really.
I’ve been telling everyone for forever that myspace was over.. it’s definitly news to me that Facebook is traveling close behind though… a sad thought for me.
PS. You are the inspiration behind my new blog http://hamiltonsappetite.com if I had not read your blog I would have never thought a blog would be worth my time. It was a day later after reading your blog that I was thinking to myself (sitting in a restaurant I love wishing I could tell people how great their food is) what could I write about.. what could my blog be about? .. and then it hit me! I could tell people about all the great restaurants I love!
So Thank you! You made me a startup blogger! Please let me know if there is something I should/shouldn’t be doing with my blog.
Your faithful reader
Tarryn Thornton AKA Hamilton’s Appetite
although MySpace should have learned to evolve, their inception wasn’t ever really about monetization and therefore their hiring practices were reflected just as poorly. still i have to give them credit for creating an experiment going into the turn of this internet age. until they rise up from their identity crisis however, MySpace is a misnomer. it should be called AdSpace.
Myspaces Demise for me anyways has come at the end of the Spring of 2009. Just because nobody logs on any longer and for that matter talks. To me, there is no need to keep logging into a site every day to see no status updates at all! So for me Myspace has been cut back from every day to every week and soon even more than that due to the lack of anything going on at the site.
For me i can understand why Facebook would be following down the same path as Myspace. Adding ridiculous things such as apps and opinion polls that clog up ones news feed really starts to annoy some of the users and sends them packing as well.
I don’t have a Twitter and see no need for it. I have no time to be reading about how Sally’s Lunch was great today. to me i find that ridiculous and a complete waste of my own time. therefore i don’t have a Twitter and still refuse to join this ridiculous trend.
What i would like to see out of a social network is a few core principles.
-The Ability to see Feeds about people that I Really care about and not about people i have added just because i know them.
-The ability to let your friends know what your doing that is meaningful and easy for them to see.
-The ability to comment them and talk to them almost like e-mail.
-The option to opt out of apps completely!
Thats what i want in a social network site. Not this ridiculousness that seems to have engulfed Myspace a year ago and What seems to be the same disease eating away at Facebook.
Well I’m not sure of that. What is annoying about MySpace is the fact it’s full of spammers, but in all honesty as a musician, all I wanted was a site that allowed me to get a page up quick and easy, and MySpace just did that, so can’t complain.
I’m still hoping MySpace will endure because it’s the best alternative I’ve had so far. Never had so many visits on any website ever since I registered on MySpace.