MTVi Cuts 25% of Workforce

MTVi.com said it reduced its staff by 25% today, or about 105 people across the entire organization.

According to a spokesperson, it was a matter of putting all of its employees into one building. "By working in a more efficient manner, it will get us to profitability faster," said the spokesperson.

Currently, MTVi.com operates four large web sites, MTV.com, VH1.com, Sonicnet.com and Country.com.

One example of the inefficiencies, said the spokesperson, is that MTVi has multiple news organizations. As a result, over a third of the job cuts were in online news. Now, it will just have one centralized news division to support all of its sites.

"We'll still be very aggresive in providing multi-genre news, but we're giving the audience what it needs and wants," said the company representative.

MTVi has been aggresive in its convergence initiatives recently, launching "Direct Effect", an interactive hip hop show viewers can vote for thenext video to appear on the TV show. It also launched a brand new interactive "Total Request Live" section at MTV.com, a few weeks ago.

The Internet radio site Sonicnet, however, wasn't hard hit. According to the spokesperson, Sonicnet (http://www.sonicnet.com) is one of the more popular sites for the company.

In June, Media Metrix reported that Sonicnet had a total of 4.7 million unique U.S. visitors.