When your parent company starts describing you as “a problem” whose losses are “not acceptable or sustainable,” it may be time to give up and go home.

MySpace is in serious trouble. OK, so that isn’t exactly news at this point in time, but it’s never been as clear as it is right now thanks to the words of President, Deputy Chairman, and COO of News Corp, Chase Carey. This is the man who will have the final say if and when News Corp. decides to pull the plug on MySpace by either selling it off cheap or abandoning it altogether. And he isn’t happy with the way things are going.

MySpace has been in decline for a couple of years now, with Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, eating into its once-impressive market share and leaving it to rot in social networking desert. As Facebook grew to more than 500 million users, MySpace lost users left, right, and center as people began to realize there was a better alternative out there.

According to PaidContent, Carey used the company’s latest earnings call to analysts to express his feelings on the current state of MySpace. The site delivered an operating loss of $156 million on revenue of $298 million in the last quarter, which compares to a $126 million operating loss on revenue of $400 million for the same period last year. Carey commented:

    We have been clear that MySpace is a problem. We recognize that we had to redefine and largely rebuild this business. We believe the foundation was there to warrant this effort and it has been our focus this year. We have made adjustments in the cost structure and most recently by consolidating ad sales and most importantly in the last few weeks we have relaunched MySpace with a focus on social entertainment. We feel really good about this relaunch product and it has been generally well received by the opinion makers in the business but we recognize the critical issue is building interest with consumers. We also recognize the challenges we face in doing so. The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.

    Our current management did not create these losses, but they know we have to address them. Again, I give them great credit for pouring their hearts and sweat into creating a great new MySpace experience that has the potential to be an exciting business for us. We equally know we need to make real head way in the coming quarters to get this business to a sustainable level. Overall, when you have as many businesses and as many regions as we, do it is unlikely that they will all be operating at an optimum level on a short-term basis although we strive to make sure most are.

The final warning came as Carey said MySpace will be judged “in quarters, not in years.” In other words, MySpace will have to turn the corner fast or get dropped like a hot potato which, in the case of MySpace, has gone cold and stodgy.

If Carey is hoping to offload MySpace on the cheap then I’m not sure this was the right way of enticing potential buyers in. Because despite the recent relaunch MySpace still looks dead in the water.

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