MySpace CEO Departs Within Months of Arriving
When an employee leaves a company before their first year anniversary, it generally is surprising. 
But when a CEO departs so quickly, the word most often used is shocking. It was announced late yesterday that Owen Van Natta, the CEO of faltering social network, MySpace, is leaving the company. No future plans for Van Natta were included with the news.
The industry was hopeful when Van Natta joined in April 2009 that his experience as a former Facebook executive and his street cred from his involvement in early Silicon Valley ventures would help reinvigorate the company, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. But politics within the executive ranks at MySpace and between Van Natta and Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s Chief Digital Officer, may have made it difficult for Van Natta to ever have the impact MySpace loyalists had hoped for.
In recent weeks, it was rumored that another MySpace executive, chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn, would be leaving the company, highlighting the political battle that had obviously been heating up for the last few weeks. Hirschhorn was named co-President with fellow My Space executive, Mike Jones in the wake of Van Natta’s departure.
Less than a month ago, Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington posted a video interview with Van Natta from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the CEO appeared awkward and uncomfortable when asked to detail the consumer value proposition and strategy for the business he is running.
Clearly Van Natta had not found the magic formula to lead the business to recovery, as evidenced by last week’s News Corp earnings announcement which highlighted continued decline in ad revenue and missed quarterly revenue targets by its MySpace property.
It remains to be seen if the reduction in executive staff is enough to stabilize the social network’s weakening position, but it clearly was a distraction for the business trying to align on a common strategy for revitalization. MySpace users have grown impatient with the rate of innovation and continue to leave the service as new social media products hit the market, like Google’s recently launched Buzz service.
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