Less than a month ago I asked the MySpace Co-Presidents, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn (pictured left), if it was possible to effectively run a company with two equal leaders. Their answer – they’ve made it work. I asked if they were both there for the long term. Jones said “Assuming News Corp. will have us we’re going to stay heavily engaged.” I’ve added the video clip below.
Well, you know what they say about assumptions. Tomorrow MySpace will announce the departure of Jason Hirschhorn, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside and outside of MySpace. And we’ve also heard that Jones will be named CEO sometime soon, although likely not tomorrow.
The two were promoted to co-presidents in February when previous CEO Owen Van Natta was fired. Van Natta held the CEO spot for less than a year – he was hired to replace founding CEO Chris DeWolfe in April 2009.
Yes, it’s been musical chairs at MySpace. Or, a less charitable description: rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The company hasn’t just lost the cultural significance of being the top social network – a title they lost to Facebook long ago. They are also losing page views and users at a rapid clip. MySpace Music is hemorrhaging money to the labels. And their lucrative search deal with Google is ending in two weeks, and the company has yet to announce how they’ll replace that revenue.
For all those reasons and more, I’ve argued passionately that MySpace needs to be spun off into a private company. They can’t please News Corp. and find a way to win with users at the same time. Publicly Jones says he disagrees. Who knows what he thinks privately.
Update: Statement by Jon Miller, Digital Chief for News Corp.:
MySpace logo
, the parent company of MySpace, announced Friday that Co-President  has decided to leave the  because he wishes to return to his home city of New York. MySpace is headquartered in , California.

MySpace was founded in 2003 by  and  and purchased for $580 million by News Corps. at the height of its popularity in 2005.  In recent years, however, MySpace has been losing out in monthly unique visitors to similar sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  According to , an Internet marketing research company that tracks website traffic, Facebook attracted 519 million unique visitors in April of this year, and MySpace just 111 million visitors.  In response, MySpace has been recently shifting its focus towards music, games, and videos, and plans to continue doing the same in the near future.

Meanwhile, another failing social network, Bebo, was sold for less than $10 million by AOL to hedge fund firm  this week. AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million in 2008. MySpace's reduced traffic and the departure of another executive have led industry insiders to draw comparisons between the two sites.

In April 2009, DeWolfe stepped down as MySpace's Chief Executive Office (CEO). He was replaced by former Facebook Chief Revenue Officer , but Natta held on to that position for just nine months. In February 2010, Hirschhorn was promoted from his position as Chief Product Officer along with Chief Operating Officer  to the position of co-president. The departure of Hurschhorn leaves Jones to continue on as sole president. MySpace have said they do not intend on replacing Hirschhorn.