MySpace CEO and would-be savior Owen Van Natta, the studmuffin hired away from Facebook, told the Financial Times he's not gunning for his ex employer any more:

"Facebook is not our competition," he said. "We're very focused on a different space."

Van Natta added that MySpace it will focus on its strength: Music. MySpace has become the default Web host for independent rock bands, and recently purchased music software company iLike.

MySpace wasn't always so blasé about social networking, the company used to have Facebook in its sights. It was barely two years ago that Van Natta's predecessor Chris DeWolfe got an urgent phone call from Peter Chernin at MySpace's parent company saying, "I need a plan for dealing with Facebook in two weeks." This led, according Julia Angwin's book Stealing Myspace, to a strategy for dealing with "the Facebook challenge head on," presented at a Merrill Lynch conference.

"I realize every person in tis room wants to ask me about Facebook, and, frankly, I want to talk about Facebook," [Fox Interactive Media president Peter] Levinsohn said.

But these days MySpace has just one third of Facebook's users. No wonder the company is singing a different tune.

It's just not a well advised one. Instead of competing with a money-losing internet company headed by a twentysomething college dropout, MySpace will now be taking on Apple (cash hoard: $30 billion) and Google (annual profits: $5 billion, operator of YouTube and soon to be a retailer of MP3s). Sounds like a great plan.

Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

The official story will be that Jon Miller, the new broom from AOL, has swept aside MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his team. But as always, Murdoch alone rules News Corp. And the decision must have been his.

Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, is the chair of MySpace China, and that professional relationship has spurred dangerous gossip which can't have helped DeWolfe's standing.

Four years after he bought MySpace, Murdoch has finally rid MySpace of the spammers and scammers who launched it. It is far past time — and yet probably the right moment. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin's book, Stealing MySpace, has exposed MySpace's roots in porn, spam, and hacking. As the economic tide that boosted MySpace's advertising sales has receded, DeWolfe has been shown to be swimming naked. And Miller, as News Corp.'s newest Internet executive and the latest to have won Murdoch's ear, is in prime position to push out DeWolfe, whose contract expires this fall. (Just one question: If DeWolfe sidekick Tom Anderson is ousted, who will become every MySpace user's default first friend?)

DeWolfe always seemed more interested in throwing parties and dating celebrities than solving MySpace's hard problems. Growth has stagnated for the past year as Facebook has surged. The site's interface remains a shambolic wreck which fails at the most basic tasks, like remembering a user's login. Talented engineers, including COO Amit Kapur, have defected. Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff meant to foster Silicon Valley-style innovation, is an industry laughingstock for launching a me-too celebrity gossip site rather than chasing genuinely new technologies. Given all this, it's possible that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng was the only thing that helped him last so long.

What now for the site? News Corp. is reportedly recruiting a new CEO already. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta would be an excellent choice, if he can be wrested away from the music startup he's currently running. Or the company might place an internal candidate from the News Corp. empire, to provide the closer eye MySpace has long needed.

Ah, but those are tiresomely sensible choices. Here are two that would maximize the Murdoch family drama everyone loves: Install prodigal son Lachlan Murdoch. Or put Deng in charge.

A sign of how insular the world of big media is: Confirmation of Miller's job offer comes from Ross Levinsohn, who held much the same job before leaving News Corp. to start a venture-capital fund with Miller.

It's all a crazy waiting game until the aging mogul can install his wayward children in power. Most believe that's the reason why Chernin left, as it grew increasingly clear that Murdoch would never let the Hollywood hired hand become CEO of News Corp. But there are plenty of takers for the big jobs available in the meantime.

Miller replaces Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, who, as many inside News Corp. expected, is taking a job with the L.A.-based Fox TV and movie units. Miller, though, will have more power than Levinsohn, running pretty much everything with a URL attached and reporting directly to Murdoch. He'll need that authority to rein in wayward MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, who has long resisted reporting to the suits rotating through the executive suite of Fox Interactive Media.

If he takes the job, that is. Papers aren't signed yet, for reasons that are mostly legalese. Miller was ousted as AOL's CEO in 2006, replaced by the astoundingly awful Randy Falco. He's since been looking for a comeback, most recently through the VC firm Velocity Interactive Group — but he's been stymied by a noncompete agreement with AOL parent Time Warner, whose CEO, Jeff Bewkes, nastily decided to enforce after Yahoo invited Miller to join its board.

That noncompete ends in three days. Assuming Miller accepts the offer, and it seems like it would be enormously embarrassing for him not to, he'd be ending one long-running drama and joining another.

(Photo via LAT)

Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which stretches from MySpace to Fox to the Wall Street Journal and around the globe, is in turmoil after the departure of longtime COO Peter Chernin. Along with newspapers, TV shows, and websites, Murdochland manufactures drama and gossip. Here's what's been filtering out.

The expiration of two lucrative deals are setting a clock on DeWolfe's career. The first is his own employment contract, which he signed in 2007, along with his cohort Tom Anderson, for a reported $30 million over two years.

The second is a $900 million search-advertising deal with Google, which ends in 2010 and which all observers agree is unlikely to be renewed on the same rich terms. On top of that, MySpace's user growth has stalled out, as rival Facebook looks set to grow to twice its size this year. Without those guaranteed revenues from Google, DeWolfe will have a tough time meeting News Corp.'s demands for better earnings. That has led Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield to predict big layoffs at MySpace.

Amidst this backdrop comes Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace. Most of the stories it tells, like Anderson's ties to an online porn business called TeamAsian.com and DeWolfe's creation of a spam empire, have been reported elsewhere (well, here, to be precise). But their appearance in an authoritative book written by a News Corp. employee gives them fresh currency.

The book surely delights DeWolfe's many enemies within News Corp., who may be behind the vicious (and apparently untrue) rumor of a dalliance with Wendi Deng, Murdoch's wife.

So how is Murdoch setting things up for DeWolfe's possible ouster? One perpetual source of friction has been MySpace's autonomous role within Fox Interactive Media, News Corp.'s internet unit which houses a collection of forgettably schlocky websites like IGN and Rotten Tomatoes. Peter Levinsohn, a longtime Fox executive, oversees FIM and MySpace.

One reshuffle scenario we've heard: Levinsohn heads back to the Fox TV and movies business, whose leadership was jumbled up after Chernin's departure. (Rumor has it that an overworked Murdoch has been reduced to setting Fox TV's primetime schedule himself.)

Fox Interactive Media would then be cleaved in twain, with MySpace running on its own under DeWolfe — for now — and darkly mordant Internet wunderkind Jeremy Philips, currently in an amorphous strategy role, taking over the grab-bag of other websites. That would put him in a position to take over MySpace if DeWolfe bolts.

That's just one scenario, which has already gathered doubters. (If Philips has not gathered as many detractors as DeWolfe, it is only because he is not as well known.) But the unsettled leadership would certainly explain a mystery about MySpace's layoffs: Why they haven't happened yet. We've been hearing rumors of impending layoffs since last June, but instead, MySpace has just made minor cuts. The company's expensive, showy San Francisco outpost ought to be on the chopping block, but it's still open. Perhaps a soft-hearted DeWolfe is hoping to push back layoffs until after he's gone?

Kapur has good timing — or at least a sense of realism. Despite a series of moves spearheaded by Kapur to copy Facebook feature for feature, the News Corp.-owned site has steadily lost traffic to the rival social network.

From: Chris Dewolfe
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:46 PM
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CHRIS DEWOLFE

Hi everyone,

I want to notify you of some changes occurring to the senior executive team at MySpace.

Amit Kapur, our Chief Operating Officer, will be leaving the company to start a new venture. Many of us who have been lucky enough to work with Amit can attest to his tenacity, passion, and creativity as a leader within MySpace and the larger industry.

Jim Benedetto, SVP of Engineering and Steve Pearman, SVP of Product Strategy will join Amit in this new chapter. Personally, I'm incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one. Most importantly, Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our senior executive team. They will remain on board for the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition company-wide.

We recently celebrated the five year anniversary of the launch of MySpace-it's a major milestone and everyone should be extremely proud of the global business that we have created in such a short amount of time. At its inception, MySpace was a product of the new social Web and in the last few years we've developed the most robust and diverse business in the marketplace.

MySpace is a social portal that empowers its global community to interact with people, content, and culture by giving individuals a personal, portable, and secure social experience. Originally, Yahoo gave consumers an organized way of navigating the Internet. Then, Google made searching the Internet extremely easy. Now, MySpace is making it simple for users to organize what's important to them through a personal and social lens.

Despite what the market tells us, 2009 will be a big year for our business. This year we will mature our existing market leading advertising technologies such as MyAds and HyperTargeting, as well as continue to innovate new ways for companies big and small to best leverage the MySpace platform. We are effectively monetizing the stickiest sections of our site such as Music and Video by coupling the world's richest content offering with creative ad programming online and off. What will always differentiate MySpace from others in the industry is our commitment to balancing revenue and relevancy.

On the product side, this past year was full of innovation including a site-wide global redesign, the impressive growth of our mobile initiatives, and the beginnings of our Open Platform product suite including MySpaceID. We're at the tip of the iceberg with the Open Platform and in the coming year we expect major new launches including payments and virtual goods. Also in 2009, MySpace Music will deliver the next round of product development such its international rollout, and new functionality including charts, ticketing, and merchandise. Most important, we will remain committed to executing on our product vision in a manner that engages our users in the process and considers their feedback every step of the way.

Tom and I want to reiterate how passionate we are about MySpace-we love the people, the product, and we believe in the future of the company. MySpace has a dedicated team of senior executives and I'd like to take the opportunity to spotlight some of these individuals. I encourage everyone to get to know our executive team as they are an enormously capable group of professionals from successful media and Internet powerhouses such as eBay, Yahoo!, MTV, and Symantec that will lead our company into its next phase.

MySpace Executive Team:
· Tom Anderson-President and Co-Founder
· Aber Whitcomb-Chief Technology Officer
· Travis Katz-GM and SVP of MySpace International
· Courtney Holt-President of MySpace Music
· Jeff Berman-President of Sales and Marketing
· Lin Cherry-General Counsel
· Tom Andrus-SVP of Product
· Manu Thapar-SVP of Engineering Operations
· Allen Hurff-SVP of Engineering
· Tish Whitcraft-SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest-SVP of Business Development
· Angela Courtin-SVP of Marketing
· Abe Thomas-VP of Online Marketing
· Dani Dudeck-VP of Global Corporate Communications

In a tough economy, we're continuing to prove to the industry that we're a serious business defining a new social portal category for a Web that's more personal, portable, and collaborative than ever before. Thanks everyone for a record breaking year 2008-the coming year will be even more important for the company and our 130 million global users worldwide.

Best,
Chris

Aside from her unofficial role as her husband's consigliere, Deng is the chief strategist of MySpace China. So it's hardly unusual for her to show up at the office. Indeed, since MySpace China's CEO abruptly quit last September and still hasn't been replaced amid ongoing boardroom drama, she might as well be running the show.

Yet MySpace China is more or less a failure, with less than 10 million users at last count, against rival Chinese services with more than 100 million users in the country.

Meanwhile, there is what looks like an ongoing smear campaign suggesting that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Deng, who both serve on MySpace China's board, had an affair — one that some claim is spread by Roger Ailes, a rival executive at News Corp. We have to wonder: If MySpace China had a business worth talking about, would anyone be dwelling on this rumor?

The World Economic Forum, known as Davos for the Swiss mountain resort where it's held, is more notable for who's not going to the glitzy, star-studded affair. Only the organizers pretend that the purpose of the event is to hold lofty sessions about global economics, the intellectual fig leaf which covers the schmoozing and boozing.

Here's a list of the true elite — the people smart enough to drop out of Davos, via Portfolio:

• Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack
• Google cofounder Sergey Brin
• Chevron CEO David O'Reilly
• Ken Griffin of hedge fund Citadel Investments
• Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein
• Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit
• Sony CEO Howard Stringer

If they're not going, why is DeWolfe so determined? A tipster tells us he feuded with his ostensible boss, Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, over his Davos trip. Levinsohn reportedly thought it was a terrible idea; Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit which includes MySpace, just laid off 100 employees, and we hear MySpace is prepping 300 layoffs of its own, including the possible closure of its recently opened San Francisco office. (An engineer MySpace was recruiting in San Francisco was abruptly told in the middle of the process that the job he was interviewing had moved to the Los Angeles headquarters, not San Francisco.)

No matter! DeWolfe will get his photos taken with world leaders, celebrities, and the cluster of kooky hangers-on like Julia Allison and Nouriel Roubini who have wangled their way into the conference. It will certainly reinforce DeWolfe's image, though probably not in the way he anticipated.

(Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

The oddest thing about DailyFill's launch is its parent company: MySpace is part of the News Corp. empire, and it even carries items from Page Six, the stalwart gossip section of the New York Post. Page Six tried to launch its own gossip site, which got the slash in March after a three-month run. (Technically, the site came from Slingshot Labs, a MySpace-run incubator; Slingshot is ostensibly independent, but for all practical purposes, it exists to generate new sites and features for MySpace. You can tell how non-independent Slingshot actually is by how extremely touchy Slingshot employees get when you suggest it's part of MySpace.)

MySpace tends to run independently, even from Fox Interactive, the News Corp. division in which it's housed. And the social network's executives have absolutely zero shame about launching thoroughly derivative also-ran features. (You've probably never seen a MySpace Video embed, but you're not missing anything — it looks just like YouTube.)

DailyFill's in the same vein: It looks just like Yahoo's pictures-and-headlines OMG, which is, in turn, more or less a less texty clone of AOL's TMZ.

"We shat this out in a week," a MySpace engineer tells me.

The main difference from MySpace's other cloning experiments is that the MySpace brand is nowhere to be seen on the site. Could it be that MySpace, like AOL, is growing ashamed of the tawdry associations of its own brand? The site does have a small homage to its boss, however, in an item about MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe getting named to People's sexiest-dudes list.

The rumor itself is actually at least 18 months old — we first heard it last year after a reporter at a major business magazine got the News Corp. nuclear treatment when he rang up the flacks to ask whether they had made out at a party — largely spurred by Deng being named the "chief of strategy" at MySpace China last summer, putting her in close (business) contact with DeWolfe. And then there were reports that DeWolfe was using his friendship with Deng in his negotiations for a new compensation package with News Corp.

The first time in the most recent spate of tips was in the form of an an email from someone using the Dark Knight pseudonym "Harvey Dent" and was pre-written in gossip-columnese ("What media mogul billionaire’s wife has been guilty of so many sexual escapades that she is the talk of LA?"), but it also made some amateurish mistakes, such as referring to "Wendy Deng." The second tipster came from inside a media organization that's locked horns with News Corp. plenty of times in the past. The third was the most aggressive. Their first account was that they had heard that someone with a grudge against Murdoch had hired a private investigator who had discovered that Deng was involved with "Chris DeWitt." Asked why someone was digging dirt on Rupert, they said it was "more of a personal interest."

None of the new tipsters have offered any new evidence to made us think it's true. Like the Jossip item, all leaned heavily on the detail that they're hooking up at 141 Prince St. But that's hardly a secret address. since that's where the Murdochs live when they're in New York. And as someone familiar with the Murdochs points out, they sold that apartment in 2005 and now live on Fifth Ave. So color us skeptical. Though, of course, if you know more than our previous tipsters, we're interested in that, too.

We're told Dudeck leaked Arrington not only the MySpace Music screenshots, but also tipped him to a story about MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson's brush with the FBI as a hacker in the 1980s. The article served to burnish Anderson's rather questionable geek credentials.

MySpace has helped Arrington's business in other ways besides feeding him stories. The News Corp.-owned social network was a major sponsor of the recent TechCrunch50 conference.

Arrington has no issue bragging privately about his relationship with Dudeck. And Dudeck, our source says, has "no issues to sleeping with key influencers." Before Arrington, we hear, the rumor was Dudeck dated MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe.

But don't believe us — let's go to the tape. Check out this clip of DeWolfe and Dudeck together at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, caught by Kara Swisher for AllThingsD. The way Dudeck leans in to DeWolfe to stay warm tells you more than any of our anonymous sources.

Kara's quippy response — "You don't have to love me" — reminds me of an anecdote my boss once related about Dudeck. The flirtatious MySpace flack accosted him at a conference last year and said, "We really need to work on our relationship." Sorry, Dani — Owen doesn't swing that way.

Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.

Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, whose company already offers a similar product,

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

DeWolfe and his MySpace cohort, Tom Anderson, renewed their contracts last fall with News Corp. last year for $15 million apiece, spread over two years. Paying that amount has, FIM executives believe, left nothing for them. "They're pissed," says our tipster.

Then again, do these puffed-up Fox executives deserve much more than they're getting? Pop quiz: Name a Fox Interactive property other than MySpace.

We kid, of course. What this really confirms is what we knew all along: DeWolfe is a wannabe Hollywood type; rather than a hit movie, he has a hit website. Or had. It's precisely when stars begin fading that they begin prime targets for the paparazzi. MySpace has seen better days. As has DeWolfe. That he's hanging out with the likes of Hilton tells us all we need to know about the future arc of his career. It reminds us, in fact, of the idea of Yahoo merging with MySpace. Yes, that once seemed hot, too.

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  

All,

Since its inception nearly three years ago, FIM and its properties have experienced phenomenal growth and success as a result of your collective efforts. You have worked diligently to create the largest, most innovative content communities in the world, and, as a company, we are now prepared to take the next step in our evolution.

That next step involves two things: 1) leveraging our industry-leading advertising technologies to create an entirely new business for the company and 2) more closely aligning our products and revenue. We will achieve this alignment through a restructure of our sales and advertising groups that will begin to take effect in the coming weeks.

FIM Audience Network

First, we have created a new business unit called the FIM Audience Network.

Despite the press in our industry about the challenges of monetizing social media, we have built amazing Hyper Targeting and Optimization technologies that dramatically improve our ability to provide better advertising solutions to our clients. Given these strengths, Adam Bain - who has been so instrumental in developing this capability - has been promoted to President of the new unit.

Adam's team will be comprised of FIM's ad technology, ad operations and performance sales groups. Their charter will be to optimize monetization across FIM's content network and those of other third-party publishers. The merging of these groups into a single business unit will provide our family of brands and new third-party clients with the ability to extend their reach and enhance their advertising effectiveness across a vast online audience.

Integrated Sales

In addition to the creation of the FIM Audience Network, we will be integrating our branded sales teams (including client solutions, sales development, and traffic generation) into the operating businesses that they support.

This change recognizes that our individual business units have evolved to a point where it is clear they are best served by dedicated professionals who live and breathe those products alone.

For example, at MySpace we have launched our developer platform, unveiled incredible new features and functionality and, just today, announced our landmark joint venture with leaders in the music industry to form MySpace Music. In order to maximize the benefits of these events it is essential for our product and sales team to work hand in hand.

By integrating the sales teams in this way, each operating unit will be empowered to assume responsibility for its revenue, growth and profitability. Further, each operating group will be afforded greater flexibility to implement processes and programs that meet the unique needs of their respective markets.

Since the sales teams will now be integrated with their respective brands, we will no longer have a separate FIM Revenue Group. In the two years that he's been here, Michael Barrett has built a phenomenal sales team and driven tremendous results - helping to exceed our News Corp estimates and achieve profitability as a division. His efforts have primed FIM to take this important step in the next phase of our growth, and I want to thank him for his contributions. Michael will remain with the company for the next two months to guide the transition before moving on to pursue new endeavors.

Members of affected groups will be transitioning in the next few weeks and will hear more details from their respective leaders.

Closing

This reorganization is a milestone for FIM that will create many exciting changes and opportunities for each of you, as well as for our company going forward.

I am confident that we are moving in the right direction to secure our long-term success, and I am certain that we have the right leadership team in place to take us there.

I'm very proud of all of you, and I thank you for your ongoing commitment to the organization.

Thank you.