MySpace prepares for "massive" layoffs

[hugh]

The online social network is preparing to lay off as many as 500 of its 1,600 workers, the TechCrunch blog reported on Wednesday, as it cuts costs while trying to stay ahead of growing competition from rival Facebook.

[Dioneo]

Got to expect that kind of thing when you work for a .com fad...

[cooper83]

Wow, people still use MySpace?

I expect (hope) we'll see a similar announcement from FaceBook in about a year. And then Twitter the year after that.

[jvincent]

I'm surprised it takes that many people to run MySpace. I'd be curious how many are employed at the other social networking sites.

Other than a small battalion of IT guys to keep the servers running, there isn't that much ongoing S/W development required.

[grog]

Originally Posted by jvincent

I'm surprised it takes that many people to run MySpace.

Those were my thoughts exactly. Even the 1,100 remaining employees seems way high for a site like that. Isn't the point of MySpace so that people can create their own personal sites? What then do all of these employees do? It's not like MySpace has a tonne of content to create and maintain themselves.

It seems the Silicon Valley mentality still hasn't changed much. I remember back in the dot com heyday where all of these "companies" that were little more than a gimmicky website with no real business model somehow had hundreds of employees. Most of them quickly collapsed under their own weight once the bubble burst and the money dried up.

MySpace at least still gets a relatively large amount of traffic (albeit a lot less than they used to) so presumably they're taking in a decent amount of revenues from advertising, etc. Therefore, they should be able to run a profitable business. However, I have to believe they still have a lot of fat that needs trimming until that can happen.