Myspace
Mark Rosenbaum, a former consultant to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., will oversee budgeting, strategic planning and financial reporting, Los Angeles-based MySpace said. Rosenbaum, 47, who starts immediately, also worked as senior vice president of corporate finance at Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc.
Van Natta, who joined from rival Facebook Inc. in April, has focused on luring new talent to help boost advertising and add features for the sites 125 million users. While MySpace has yet to publicly spell out a new business strategy, it has introduced e-mail accounts, bought the music-recommendation service iLike and let users sync status updates with Twitter.
“Internally weve got our priorities in place,” Jason Hirschhorn, named chief product officer in April, said in an interview. “Twitter is the beginning of other types of relationships were going to have with other sorts of networks.”
Rosenbaums challenge will be to reverse revenue declines. Advertising sales fell at MySpace in the quarter ended June 30. News Corp. recorded impairment charges that quarter mainly tied to the performance of Fox Interactive Media, the unit that includes MySpace. That reduced earnings by 17 cents a share.
News Corp., based in New York, rose 14 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $11.41 at 11:42 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares had gained 24 percent this year before today. Van Natta and Rosenbaum werent available for comment, according to Dani Dudeck, a spokeswoman for MySpace.
Founder Departs
Hirschhorn and Chief Operating Officer Mike Jones were the first executives hired by Van Natta and News Corp.s digital media chief, Jonathan Miller, after the departure of MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe.
Van Natta, 39, also hired Bill Bliss, the former head of search at Microsoft, to overhaul how users seek information on MySpace. Katie Geminder was brought in as senior vice president of user experience and design, Mike Macadaan as vice president of product, and Alex Maghen as chief technology officer.
The Web site also hired advertising consultant Media Link LLC, whose ranks include President Wenda Harris Millard, formerly of Yahoo! Inc. and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.
The moves are part of a restructuring that included the June firing of 30 percent of MySpaces U.S. staff and two-thirds of its international workforce.
“Its not to say that MySpace needs to overhaul every person that works there,” Hirschhorn said. “Weve got tremendous talent inside.”