News Corp. may shut down its MySpace operations if the business doesn’t turn around within the next several months, Chase Carey, the company’s chief operating officer, said last week.
After a $70 million drop in revenue and plummeting traffic, the executive said the results were “not acceptable or sustainable” and implied the site will be shut down if it isn’t fixed. A timetable wasn’t given, but MySpace’s timeframe would be measured “in quarters, not in years,” Carey said in a conference call with reporters.
MySpace has been in decline for years as Facebook has superseded it in popularity. The site has traditionally focused on music. MySpace’s streaming and per-track download service had at one time been thought big enough to challenge iTunes. However, it failed to get traction.
Just last month, MySpace previewed a major overhaul of its site that would both give it a more modern, polished look and focus more on music, games and TV than pure social networking.
