MySpace plans site overhaul to rekindle growth

WITH shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups, News Corp's MySpace, the one-time leader in Internet social networking, has had a rocky year.

Mike Jones, who took over as co-president last month with Jason Hirschhorn, said that even within MySpace some employees have lost the will to keep fighting. "We are at the point now where we need believers," said Jones, noting that the company has encouraged various individuals not fully committed to the cause to leave and has hired new talent.

The need for faith speaks to the scope of the challenge facing MySpace. With competition from booming social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and Google Inc jumping into the fray, MySpace hopes to become the first social network to regain its mass appeal.

At the company's Beverly Hills headquarters on Monday, Jones and Hirschhorn outlined their plan for the first time since taking the reins as co-presidents. They pulled the curtain back on a new version of the site that will be rolled out in installments over coming weeks and months.

The new site recasts MySpace more strongly around its music and media content, with features such as the ability to listen to a music playlist based on songs that other MySpace users are sharing in their stream of updates.

The goal is to spur growth among new users and to lure back users that have departed, says Hirschhorn.

"We do not want to stay at 100 million (users) or 120 million. We want to grow to 200 million or 300 million," Hirschhorn said, though he declined to give a time frame for achieving those numbers.

MySpace had 119.6 million unique visitors worldwide in January 2010, down 7.4 percent year-over-year (though up from its November low of 108.1 million), according to ComScore. While those seem like respectable numbers, Facebook says it now counts 400 million active users.

Hirschhorn, a former executive with Viacom Inc's MTV Networks, joined MySpace in April 2009 as Chief Product Officer, part of a new management team that brought in Jones as Chief Operating Officer and Owen Van Natta as CEO. Less than 10 months later, Van Natta is gone, due to what a source close to the company said was a personality conflict among the trio. Van Natta couldn't be reached for comment.Reuters