Zynga has hired casual gaming and social networking heavyweight Owen Van Natta as their new Executive Vice President of Business. This is big news for Zynga, who is attempting to recruit all the top talent they can as they hint at an IPO and continue receiving sizable investments from across the globe. Van Natta will also join the Zynga board of directors and help guide the company through this very important time.
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This evening MySpace sent out a press release announcing that the company’s CEO, Owen Van Natta, is stepping down and will replaced by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn who will serve as co-Presidents. There are a number of interesting components of this news story. The most interesting is that we’ve been hearing rumors that Owen Van Natta was under strict orders to turn the company and if it wasn’t turned around within 6 months he was out. The other interesting tidbit is that Techcrunch recently published that Jason Hirschhorn was exiting the company.
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The NYTimes’ Brian Stelter and Tim Arango write about the challenges facing MySpace’s new CEO Owen Van Natta as the site cedes social networking eyeballs to Facebook.
Compared with the overall online population in the United States, the site draws disproportionate numbers of teenagers, twentysomethings and people whose household income is less than $25,000 a year, according to the measurement firm comScore. The Facebook audience tends to be more affluent, making it a more appealing space for higher-end advertisers.
Furthermore, there are indications that MySpace is losing audience outright. While the site drew 70 million unique visitors in the United States in February and in March, that figure was down from 75 million in December and in January.
Van Natta, who did not comment for the story, and who previously worked for Facebook, is expected to make audio and video an even larger part of the MySpace strategy.
While Facebook increasingly serves as the world’s phone book, MySpace sees itself as a media platform for culture, akin to a television. Its popularity among musicians has bolstered MySpace Music, a site that lets users create playlists and swap songs. Plans for an international music expansion and a mobile song product are under way.
