Myspace Update

It's been a while since the Myspace blog and today we follow up by reporting that this week the BBC, Yahoo News, and other news channels wrote about the fact that Myspace lost 10 million unique visitors in a single month. Myspace is on a downwards spiral, losing over 55 million total unique visitors since February of last year.

It seems that the website's decline hasn't slowed down a bit and it has forced executives to fire over 500 staff to date. Myspace was a big part of the beginnings of bands like Artic Monkeys and comedian Dane Cook who had extreme success launching their careers with it's help. And in an attempt to go back to these roots, Myspace CEO Mike Jones confirmed last year that the site was no longer a place for social networking but instead its a music and entertainment destination. It seem's that their efforts on focusing on music/entertainment has not been sufficient to get the site back on it's feet, and the problem is that new artists have a wide horizon of possibilities to reach their audience outside of Myspace, including the giant Youtube.com.

News Corp continues trying sell the troubled company with little success even after their countless revamps to the site. In the meantime most of their focus will remain on adding content and informing it's users on the latest updates on celebrities, music, movies and TV. Check out their latest effort in Snoop Dogg's Myspace page where you can listen to "Doggumentary", his latest studio album, before it hits stores on March 29th.

I still have faith in Myspace, although it seems that News Corp's strategy is to slow down the downfall before giving the site away.  Creativity can go a long way when applied correctly, stay tuned folks.

-MGM

Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20110324/tc_zd/262291
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/12862139
http://www.myspace.com/snoopdogg

Myspace: The Rise, The Fall, and The Rebirth?

This is my Myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/smaug27

I logged in today for the first time since I last updated the headline back in spring of 2009 when i was three months away from a trip to Dominican Republic. The background image along with all the coding that i spent hours messing with remain the same as it was back then, but something is different now, and it's not the page itself, but the whole network.

The Rise

Myspace launched in August of 2003 as clone of  Friendster and quickly became the most popular social networking site by July 2005 when it reached 22 million members. During that time, if you were a musician, performer, photographer, etc.. and didnt have a Myspace account, you would not be taken seriously. News Corp then bought MySpace for a whooping 580 million dollars and the site kept growing steadily reaching 27 million members by September of the same year.

Myspace was "cool" back then. It allowed it's users to modify their page or their "space" to express themselves in any way they wished to. It was a great place to discover and be discovered. Myspace allowed you to be a Superstar in your own world, perfect examples of this are users like Tila Tequila, who blew up on Myspace and was then given a Reality TV show by VH1, and Christine Dolce aka "Forbidden", who thanks to her popularity on the site was able to launch her own brand of clothes and even pose for Playboy.

The Fall

So what went wrong? Myspace's popularity peaked halfway through 2007 and then suddenly started decreasing as we can see in this trending chart by google:

 

Myspace hasn't been able to get back on it's feet since Facebook took over as the number one social networking site in April 19 of 2008. Some may argue that the downfall began when News Corp, after buying Myspace, started treating it's music community like crap by making it harder and harder to share music, others blame it on the fact that they ruined the user experience by monetizing the site to shreds. All the while Facebook remained better, lighter, faster, and not filled with as much spam. At the end of the day it's the consumer's choice and the worldwide switch from Myspace to Facebook seemed only natural.

The Rebirth?

USA Today reported that News Corp was ready to sell Myspace on February 03, 2011. And even though it may sell for way less than the $580 million it was originally bought for, there may be still room for a comeback. According to Anthony Miyazaki, Research Professor and Associate Professor of Marketing at Florida International University, not all hope is lost. He argues that integrating with Facebook and other growing social media sites like Youtube and Twitter is key to staying alive and maybe being the next big thing... again.

Resuscitating what was once an untouchable giant of social media networks will require skill and lots of creativity. Stay tuned folks, this will be interesting!

-MGM

Sources:
http://www.myspace.com/smaug27
http://www.myspace.com/TilaTequila
http://www.myspace.com/forbidden
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/mywtf_the_rise_and_fall_of_myspace/
http://www.wesleyverhoeve.com/why-myspace-failed-or-when-you-kill-the-user-experience-you-kill-yourself
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/02/news-corp-says-its-ready-to-sell-myspace/1
http://e-marketingforsensiblefolk.blogspot.com/