The Daily Swarm

Hollywood Reporter:

MTV Networks has trimmed the staff of its MTV Music Group and Logo division.

About 50 employees were laid off Tuesday, representing 1% of MTV Networks’ work force.

The latest round of layoffs follow the cut of 850 jobs in December when Viacom eliminated 7% of its work force, with the MTV Networks division among the most affected.

Reuters:

MySpace, the social networking website owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, said on Tuesday it plans to cut about two-thirds of its international workforce and close at least four of its offices outside the United States.

The proposed restructuring plan would reduce MySpace’s international staff to about 150 people from 450, the company said in a statement.

The planned cuts come on top of MySpace’s announcement last week that it was reducing its U.S. staff by about 30 percent to 1,000 people, saying its staffing levels were “bloated” and had hurt its ability to be efficient and nimble.

“Techcrunch”:

This morning, when MySpace announced the decimation of its international staff (300 out of 450 non-US staff will be let go), CEO Owen Van Natta pinpointed the global offices he considers dispensable. He released a statement saying that while the London, Berlin and Sydney offices will be preserved, MySpace will look to “restructure” the offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain and plans to close four offices all together.

Considering Facebook’s massive growth both internationally and now in the U.S., we thought it would be instructive to compare the number of unique visitors to Facebook and MySpace in each of the countries which MySpace has identified for layoffs and restructuring. All together, the countries account for only about 15 percent of MySpace’s global unique visitors (see chart at right). But more tellingly, in practically every single country where layoffs are coming, Facebook has already won.