MySpace chief executive Owen Van Natta abruptly stepped down on Wednesday night, News Corp said, in another setback for its beleaguered social networking arm.
Two executives, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, will become co-presidents of MySpace, reporting to News Corp chairman of digital media Jonathan Miller. The moves are effective immediately.
Currently, Jones is the chief operating officer and Hirschhorn is the chief product officer of MySpace.
“In talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time,” Miller said in a statement.
He called Van Natta’s challenge in revitalizing MySpace “incredible” and said the business “has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work.”
Van Natta joined MySpace just 10 months ago from Project Playlist, an online music venture. Two months later, the company cut its workforce by nearly one third.
Van Natta said at the time that he wanted MySpace to “return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”
Previously, he worked at Facebook as its chief revenue officer.
Once the behemoth of the social networking set, MySpace’s size and ambitions have shrunk in recent years.
While MySpace remains a popular source of entertainment, its audience has eroded as Internet users flock to competing social networking sites, especially Facebook. At the end of 2008, MySpace accounted for about 64 percent of visits to major social networking sites, according to the measurement firm comScore, while Facebook accounted for about 29 percent.
By the end of last year, their positions had reversed, with Facebook attracting 68 percent of the traffic and MySpace earning just 28 percent.
“MySpace is not where we want it,” News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch told analysts this month.
Murdoch said that MySpace’s traffic had started to stabilize, and that the new management team, including Van Natta, had repositioned the Web site as “the prime place where people share thoughts and ideas about music, entertainment and other popular content.”
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