Owen Van Natta, MySpace’s new CEO announced new features at the Web 2.0 conference. Most prominent among them include options to purchase music from iTunes without having to leave the site. Van Natta wants to mark and fortify the core competence of MySpace as a content sharing portal. His vision is to make MySpace the most popular place for sharing music, TV content, Videos, Games and more. On questions about the revenue to be generated form content socializing he said with News Corporation backing, the biggest content company on planet, they would work out some revenue sharing deals with content owners and bring in some clever advertising.
Owen Van Natta (src:telegraph.co.uk)
MySpace – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owned social networking portal has been loosing steam steadily for some time now. It once used to be US number one social networking site. Facebook has beaten it to be the new US and Global leader with over 300 million users while MySpace is loosing users everyday with a current strength of around 100 million users. (Checkout how social networks fared last month)
Owen Van Natta was previously the Chief Revenue Officer at Facebook and he joined MySpace with the top job. He now faces the uphill task winning back lost users while competing against his previous employer. He has been often labeled “superman” among his colleagues for his supra-normal energy levels. After joining the “Titanic with a Hole” he has sacked around 30% of the staff and made major changes in previous management strategies. Pressure mounts on him as he has to deal with the upcoming renewal of revenue sharing deal with Google that brought MySpace $900 million in 2006. With dying popularity it would be a hard time bargaining a same or better deal with Google. We sincerely hope Mr Van Natta turns the tide in My Space’s favor.
