MySpace to lay off 30 percent of staff

[Yazar]

Hi,
This is my first post to the forum, it’s very informative and enjoyable really.
According to Routers, Myspace will cut its staff by 30 percent. As you can guess, Facebook and Twitter are very powerful competitors of myspace. There are many more competitor in online community industry and I wonder which one will become most powerful. Any predictions?

[NdEd]

I would predict that they will all fail unless they can effectively find a way to monetize their websites.

[tedanderson]

Anyone who works for those companies will have to learn how to sell the advertising if they plan on keeping their jobs. The situation is pretty much the same as it was 8 years ago- as long as there were investors pumping money into these dot coms, people were employed regardless of whether they were selling anything.

[Lucas]

Facebook now accounts for 19% of Google ’s search traffic and it is growing at 188% annually. That means Google’s marketshare gains over the other search engines eg. Yahoo and MSN have been bolstered by Facebook traffic and not necessarily by Google taking away traffic from the other search engines or more users visiting Google directly.

This is serious stuff – the largest search engine is dependent on an unprofitable social networking site for 19% of its traffic? Wow! and that is free traffic. What if Facebook decides it wants to get paid for the traffic. What would that be worth to Google?

In fact Google is paying Myspace US$1 billion over three years for low quality traffic and I would guess Myspace contributes less that 5 percent of Google’s traffic. Google also purchased a 5 percent stake in AOL for US$1 billion in a traffic and ad distribution deal. I would guess AOL is contributing about 14% of Google’s traffic and getting a fat cut of the Adsense money.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer must be scratching his head in confusion – his company poured money into Facebook to counter Google and in turn Facebook is bolstering Google.C