MySpace cuts jobs as it loses out to Facebook
So, why is MySpace losing out? Has anyone been on any MySpace sites lately? The inconsistent user interface, with the photo albums looking totally different from the profiles, the backgrounds people are able to use, which make the text difficult to read; the music, which starts playing every time you load someone’s profile and you have to stop it, five seconds after loading it …
Facebook has its problems and annoyances, admittedly — the contents changing about a second after you go back a page, for example — but at least the look and feel is consistent from page to page. It does its job as a social networking site. MySpace is a musicians’ homepage service, which allows music to be shared easily and event notices to be put out. Facebook doesn’t offer much of that, but its facilities for users other than musicians are vastly superior. There is also the “snowball effect” of people joining as their friends join.
However, another important reason is that advertising revenues are declining, and I’ve seen this myself on my Google AdSense revenues which haven’t reached $16 any month this year. A lot of these free blogging and networking services depend on advertising, which makes them vulnerable in times of recession. I have long held the suspicion that a “blog crunch” is likely, in which free services made possible by advertising, corporate off-cuts and companies based on long-shot business models which have never made money become unviable and disappear. How long this takes is difficult to predict, but there is a distinct chance of some of us one day finding that our blogs are simply no longer there.
More: Web Worker Daily (HT: Faraz).
