MySpace founders to depart before contracts expire

DeWolfe and Anderson will both leave the company they founded before their contracts are due to expire in October.

DeWolfe will continue to serve on the board of MySpace China and will be a strategic advisor to News Corp while his co-founder Tom Anderson is in talks with News Corporation's recently appointed Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller about assuming a new role in the organisation.

It is being reported that News Corp is close to completing a deal to name former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Owen Van Natta as chief executive.

Van Natta will report to Miller, the former AOL chief executive who was recently joined News Corp in the newly created position of chief digital officer with MySpace as part of his remit.

Miller said that "Thanks largely to their vision, MySpace has become a vibrant creative community with 130m passionate followers worldwide. It is an enormously successful property and we look forward to building on its achievements with a new management structure we'll announce in the near future."

News Corp bought the social-networking site four years ago for $580m, two years after DeWolfe and Anderson started it.

It has since grown into a site with more than 130m users worldwide and more than 1,600 staff.

DeWolfe said: "It's been one of the best experiences of my life and we're proud of, and grateful to, the team of talented people who helped us along the way. We thank them, as well as the MySpace community for making our vision a reality."

Anderson said: "I look forward to working with Jon. I love this business, and look forward to its next chapter."

It is thought that News Corp will work to revamp MySpace and fight back against Facebook and newer rivals such as Twitter, and look to generate more revenues for the site which have fallen short of expectations.

While MySpace still dominates the social-networking scene its US audience has fallen.

In March, MySpace attracted 70.1m unique visitors, down 3.6% from a year ago, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Outside of the US Facebook has surpassed MySpace, closing in with 61.2m unique visitors in March - up 72%.