Chris DeWolfe, MySpace’s CEO, has said that the company intends to hire 1,600 people and expand to seven new countries within the next year. It means to defeat Facebook, Google, and everything else you can imagine, too.
“We’ll run out of people in the U.S.,” DeWolfe told Bloomberg’s Gillian Wee. “Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world.”
Yes. Well . . . good luck with that. DeWolfe recently signed a new contract with News Corp., so perhaps he’s just sort of floating along on his new funds; the evidence certainly doesn’t suggest that MySpace is about to dominate the planet.
If nothing else, one has to consider the hype – I see dozens of stories a day revolving around Facebook. Many of them are positive, and the few articles I come across concerning MySpace are usually less glowing.
Then there’s data from Hitwise indicating that MySpace has already lost its lead over Facebook in the U.K., and isn’t looking so healthy in Australia. These major English-speaking markets could easily lead a trend; it might be stranger, in fact, if they didn’t act as leaders.
MySpace is far from dead – in many areas, it still has more users than Facebook, and the financial backing of News Corp. should never be underestimated. Just the same, any sort of balance between existing in seven new countries and being the biggest website in the world, is, in the long term, probably going to lean towards the smaller side.
Hat tip to Jordan Golson.
