[iDC] MySpace staff cuts

Thu Jun 25 00:48:30 UTC 2009

Jean, all,

Why weird? The idea that the Internet exists to make money is the  
prime mistake, as I have been arguing for years. It is about exactly  
what YouTube so directly provides: a means for individuals to compete  
for attention. Some relatively few companies such as Google have found  
ways at least temporarily to profit but most of the Internet is not  
about money at all. Far more "transactions" are pure attention  
transactions. Twitter and Facebook are two examples of  platforms that  
allow attention transactions that their founders and other hope will  
make money somewhere down the road. Maybe that will be the way YouTube  
did, by being bought by Google. Now Google is stuck with an albatross,  
but if it cuts it off all YouTube users will be angered, and that's  
just about everyone.

People on this list seem mostly to have adopted the perverse attitude  
of Wall Street: the Internet should be about making money for  
corporations. The only difference is that most here see that as bad.  
Both Wall Street and you fail to consider that something else is  
really going on, that most corporate hopes will not pan out, the would- 
be profiteers are mostly just patsies for the attention seekers and  
payers. Even Google is probably much more useful for the new economy  
than not. Its making money is beside the point.

Let me add: this new economy is not primarily about advertising or  
about collecting info on audience members, except in Norman Mailer's  
sense of "Advertisement for Myself."

Best,
Michael

On Jun 24, 2009, at 8:33 AM, Jean Burgess wrote:

> Sean, thanks for this concrete example. It points us to something I  
> find very interesting.
>
> On the one hand, you have the massive unpaid workforce of people who  
> through their various activities co-create the value (however  
> defined) of platforms for user-created content. On the other, you  
> have the profound inability of most of these platform providers to  
> make any real money out of that activity - once you factor in  
> bandwidth costs, and at least thus far.
>
> YouTube is a particularly sharp example of this -where UGC is both  
> the driver of YouTube's growth and a ruinous waste of bandwidth  
> because nobody wants to run their ads alongside it: it's  
> unpredictable in content and not clearly enough located in any  
> particular national (that is, US) market.
>
> For platform providers like YouTube Inc, the "users" who provide  
> content (and who have to a very significant extent built the thing  
> we call YouTube) are, I suspect, seen as mere placeholders (one day,  
> the "real", monetisable content will replace all those pointless  
> skateboarding cat videos). The trouble is, YouTube now has a culture  
> of its own: and its "attention economy" is in practical terms  
> incompatible with commercial media logics.
>
> I really do think this is a weird situation.
>
> Cheers
> Jean
>
> On 24/06/2009, at 2:17 PM, Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> What’s so fascinating is just how small the workforce behind a  
>> global player can be; pointing toards the economic scale of content  
>> production by users
>>
>> Extracted from a longer piece at
>> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/biz-tech/myspace-cuts-twothirds-of-global-workforce-20090624-cvw1.html
>>
>> June 24, 2009 - 10:15AM
>> Social networking site MySpace plans to cut 300 jobs, or two-thirds  
>> of its overseas work force, in an effort to rein in costs and focus  
>> on countries where it has many users and better business  
>> opportunities.
>>
>> The move comes a week after the News Corp. unit said it would cut  
>> 420 jobs in the U.S., or nearly 30 per cent of its domestic work  
>> force. Combined, the cuts will reduce MySpace's employee base by  
>> nearly 40 per cent to about 1,150.
>>
>> "Our goal to tap into as many international markets as possible  
>> drove us to create too many offices around the globe, and with them  
>> came inefficiencies," chief executive Owen Van Natta, a former  
>> executive at rival Facebook, said in a memo sent to employees.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> sean
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