Sony laid off eight people from its video site Crackle.com today, one former employee tells us. Crackle was called Grouper when Sony bought it for $50 million in August 2006. And though Grouper was founded a year before YouTube, the headstart didn't help much. Check out the chart below.

Blame Crackle's founders and Sony execs for the company's woes, commenter agentX told us in August 2007:

Grouper succeeded at making the founders and a few execs a lot of money and screwing its employees in the process. Crackle is an attempt from the money greedy slimey founders to milk more cash from Sony. ...the name change buys another year of high rolling paychecks for the execs.

Josh Felser, Dave Samuel, Mike Citrin, and Aviv Eyal screwed their employees. Stay away from any venture any of these people are involved with.

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