Poor MySpace.
First, the audience it stole from Friendster left for Facebook. Now, Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive Rupert Murdoch hired less than a year ago to reverse the site's declining fortunes, has also left, MySpace announced late Wednesday night.
The bell has been tolling for MySpace for years, with users leaving the site pretty much as they found it: as a place to hear what a band sounds like and see what they look like in a matter of seconds, rather than as a place where they establish an online identity and communicate with friends.
After signing on last April, Van Natta wisely acknowledged this change in how people were using MySpace -- as a media site rather than as a social network -- by doubling down on the ad-supported MySpace Music service. However, the company was not able to fix problems with the service including poor integration with existing band pages, which left many users confused or uninterested in the service.
According to an Ad Age source, Van Natta bailed on MySpace because he was frustrated by the company's "slow pace of change" and "entrenched culture." A dearth of fast, competent, loyal software engineers in the Los Angeles area reportedly slowed things down even further. MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, in southern California. Facebook, which evolves its design and feature set so often that some users can't keep up with the changes, is located in the more technology-oriented Palo Alto, California.
We're not surprised to hear that Van Natta has left, or that the slow pace at MySpace reportedly contributed to his decision. MySpace's seven-year history follows a smooth narrative arc in retrospect:
1. Copy Friendster but make it music-friendly.
2. Sit back as everyone and their mother signs up for MySpace. Pack it with ads and sell it to News Corp.
3. Sit back as Facebook does to MySpace what MySpace did to Friendster. Lose $100 million due to a missed Google traffic target.
4. Try to remember why everyone loved MySpace so much in the first place: free music.
5. Launch a free music service with the backing of three major labels that's difficult to use, lives in a totally different section of the site from the band pages where people are used to finding music, and was apparently designed in such a complicated way that it was not easy to fix.
6. Fail.
Update: Deadline.com has the alleged e-mails MySpace staff received announcing the change in leadership. They're not tremendously fascinating, although it is interesting that the company sees its declining traffic as a good sign because it's not declining as fast as it was previously.
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