MySpace Losing to Facebook, Fires 420
June 17, 2009 by Stephen Kersey
Filed under Business
A few years ago, MySpace was the leading social networking website on the planet. Now, not only has Facebook caught MySpace in the social networking race, they’re on the verge of pulling away from MySpace.
MySpace (Flickr)
As part of that fallout, MySpace recently revealed that they will fire about one-third of their employees — or about 420 workers. MySpace says this move will allow the company to become more nimble and more comparable to Facebook. Considering before this move that MySpace had approximately 1,420 employees and Facebook had 850 employees, this move makes a lot of sense on paper.
However, this may be just a band-aid for MySpace. The company has obviously fallen behind in the technological race with other social networking websites and users are jumping ship at an alarming rate. Additionally, Google’s extremely lucrative advertising deal with MySpace will soon expire.
At this rate, MySpace is going to need to figure out how to turn around this negative trend. If not, MySpace could be in the social networking graveyard in a few years.
This is so crazy – it sounds like they were crazy bloated, but still that’s a lot of jobs lost…so sad.
A lot of people are switching but I don’t know why!!!
1) MySpace seems easier to use. Facebook is annoying, especially if you don’t have a cell phone. Basically, if you don’t have a cellphone, they assume you are a spammer. This means you have to enter a code for practically every message you send. Its highly irritating.
2) You can actually meet people on MySpace.
3) By default FaceBook reveals far too much of your private info to your “friends”.
However, recently MySpace added a commenting feature that doesn’t work on every browser. That’s highly annoying.
You would expect with more employees MySpace would compete with facebook by being BETTER.