MySpace purges 420 jobs as Facebook catches up
New CEO says staff was ‘bloated’; eliminations amount to 30 percent
LOS ANGELES – MySpace said Tuesday it is cutting nearly 30 percent of its work force in a bid to become more efficient, bringing its staffing level more in line with its more popular rival, Facebook.
The site’s latest cost-cutting effort comes less than two months after the unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta, 39, as its chief executive.
Numbers released this week by tracking firm comScore show Facebook has caught up with MySpace in monthly U.S. visitors for the first time.
“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” Van Natta said in a statement.
The cuts amount to about 420 people, bringing MySpace’s U.S. staff to 1,000. As of May, Facebook had about 850 employees worldwide, the vast majority in the United States.
MySpace’s user base has stagnated at about 125 million worldwide users, while Facebook said its usage has doubled to more than 200 million in less than a year.
Until now, MySpace still had the edge among U.S. users. But numbers from comScore show that in May, MySpace and Facebook each had about 70 million users in the United States.