

The Bleak Financial Numbers From The MySpace Sale Pitch Book - thankuz
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/exclusive-the-bleak-financial-numbers-from-the-myspace-sale-pitch-book/

======
vessenes
How hard would it really be to re-implement MySpace? I keep thinking three or
four focused coders could duplicate the major needed functionality pretty
quickly with today's web technology stack.

I ask that because I am wondering what the $250mm in run-rate expenses is for;
the article scoffs at cutting so much out of G&A next year, and that may well
be impossible, but it's hard for me to understand why Myspace needs even
$100mm a year in opex when reddit (which is, admittedly, 1/10 or less the
traffic) has been functioning with 2 - 4 person tech team.

Anyone?

~~~
vnorby
I work at Myspace (but I do not speak for the company). I'm not really privy
to all the information in the world here just being an engineer, but I do know
that it was really expensive to lay off everyone in January, and they've
definitely reduced expenses A LOT. In the past year, we've gone through
multiple reductions in size. It might not add up to the figures they're
mentioning in the article (I guess more layoffs coming?), but I do think
they've probably cut more than 60% off of the $250mm already.

EDIT: I can also sympathize with the idea that you can run myspace with just a
couple people. It would definitely require a holistic, new vision for the site
though, as the current site is quite complex and has a lot of moving parts,
where the knowledge of how those work is contained within separate units of
the company.

~~~
vessenes
Yes, totally interesting. Thanks for posting! I had a good chat about this
today in the office; on the one hand, it's insanely daunting to imagine how
you'd actually trim it down.

On the other hand, myspace's social graph, especially around entertainment is
arguably the only valuable thing at the company right now.

As a thought experiment, I asked "What if color.com owned myspace's traffic
and social graph?" My answer is that color.com would be worth much more than
the $250mm TC seems to think Myspace will sell for. Of course, that's an
inflammatory company to pick, but choose your own social company. What about
groupon, or what if Microsoft injected myspace into the Live community
somehow?

All the moving parts / separate units are probably not adding much value right
now, unfortunately. Since I haven't used myspace in many years I have no real
domain knowledge here, though. And, I browsed it for a while today after
thinking about this, and agree -- the site is huge, and complex, and as I
recalled a nightmare of horrible personal design and usability. On the plus
side, Bieber looked totally awesome.

