MySpace CEO Quits As Facebook Has 10x Daily Reach

Owen Van Natta, the CEO of MySpace since April 2009, is on his way out. Owen was hired from rival Facebook where he served as Chief Operating Officer.

In a statement, MySpace said Mr Natta will be replaced a by two people, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn.

This is probably the best thing that could happen for MySpace. Perhaps because I’m getting old as the hills now, but everyone I know has already migrated away from MySpace to Facebook.

The following graph show’s the social network’s overall reach has dropped from 8% to just above 3% over the past 18 months (no end in sight for the decline):

Are other top executives going to run for the doors as the ship sinks? Will a new leadership team get MySpace back on course? The near future will tell.

Here’s Facebook’s reach graph showing 30% (10x more traffic than MySpace now):

Google Right Side Sponsored Link Thumbnail Images

Today is the first time I noticed thumbnail images in the right side sponsored ads in google search results. Perhaps Google is taking some lessons away from Facebook’s success using the thumbnail + text for sidebar ad delivery.

Check out this example (click for fullsize)

Notice how many of the links on Google’s search results are now sponsored? They have taken 80% of the first page results for themselves.

BING should have an easier time growing market share if Google can annoy their surfers enough with the sponsored listings.

ReachLocal Expects More Financial Losses

In December, ReachLocal filed for a $100M IPO and released a few interesting numbers about their operations.

The company has a $6.1M debt obligation after acquiring the remaining shares of it’s Australia operations (in Sept ReachLocal bought the remaining 53% of shares it did not own). Somehow after this deal was completed ReachLocal reported a “non cash” gain of $16.2M on the transaction, but that the operations had already ran a deficit of $3.3M.

If you back out the one time non-cash gain and operating losses from the Australian acquisition, ReachLocal lost about $500,000/mo over the last 9 months on $143.3 million in revenue. In a pre-IPO regulatory filing, the company stated it “expects to report net operating losses in the foreseeable future”.

It was shocking to read about how much ReachLocal employees dislike their own company. This JobVent Poll shows reach scored at 14.5 out of 100 employer rating. Unhappy customers are likely to follow this trend.

YouTube Removes Stats for Number of Videos a User Has Viewed

YouTube has permanently removed the stats display for the number of videos a user has watched from user profile pages. Anyone who spends much time on YouTube quickly so the number of videos they viewed reach into the thousands or tens of thousands.

When I first noticed the display was gone, I assumed it was because people were complaining to YouTube that they did not want the world to know they had watched 300,000 videos. By chance I was browsing a YouTube developer/bug report forum on their site and came across the following post from a legitimate YouTube staff member:

“We’ve seen some of you asking what occurred to the number of video views displayed on your channel. Unfortunately, due to technical constraints, we had to permanently disable this feature. This is not a bug, it is no longer an available feature on the site.”

Looks like you can kiss that stat goodbye.

Facebook Tops Google Traffic For 3 Days in One Week

Facebook topped Google’s traffic again on New Year’s Eve, marking the 3rd time in a 7 day period the Social Networking giant exceeded Google’s US Visitor count according to Hitwise, an independent traffic monitoring firm.

Apparently people were constantly updating their status with their latest meal highlights and wishing holiday greetings to their 300 friends more often than they were searching for how to bake a ham, or find driving directions. Facebook kicking off 2010 as the number 1 site in the US seems appropriate after the huge year the company had in 2009.

Facebook Advertisers Are Not Cheering
There has been a noticable decrease in Facebook Advertising performance over the past several weeks. It seems like most of the additional traffic is not as productive as the standard daily user, I’d have bet the opposite. Stats have been delayed over the past 48 hours as they are updating or fixing the ad system. Over the past 24 hours, we saw only one ad approval cycle.