MySpace to Fire 400

Facebook likes this. The firing of 400 MySpace employees is supposed to help the company stay lean and run more efficiently. Maybe now they can hire someone to make the site look better and less like an HTML coding horror.

From Reuters here:

MySpace, the social network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, said it will cut 30 percent of its staff to lower costs as it struggles to stay popular in the face of rising competition.

MySpace will be left with about 1,000 employees, it said in a statement released on Tuesday. The company declined to say how many people work at the service, but the percentage suggests that about 400 people will lose their jobs.

The cuts are the biggest move so far by new management at the social network and an attempt, it said, to return the service to a “start-up culture.”

I think MySpace has lost so much marketshare to FaceBook that it may never recover. I think the only way they can capture the market back is to clean up the site. Standardize on just a few clean templates, get rid of annoying ads, or better yet, allow users to get a cut of the ad revenue, and tighten security.