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:
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/
I definitely believe that Myspace can be a great place for music fans and artist to interact. When doing research for my blog, I realized that If you search on Google for Billboard’s top 5 artist (Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Pink, Rihanna, and Cee Lo Green) their Myspace page still ranks among the top five websites on Google. This means that there is still potential in this market and that people is still visiting the site. However, Facebook and Twitter have taken all the buzz away from Myspace and it will be very hard for Myspace to recover. When was the last time we heard an artist asking fans to follow him on Myspace?
ReplyDeleteTechnology is going at such a fast pace that one day lost can take you out of business. We could even argue that the same painful demise can one day arrive at Facebook or Twitter. And in my opinion, for the good of the market and for the enjoyment of users, this dog eat dog competition should continue in order to fuel the most innovative ideas.
MySpace has such potential, unfortunately it has fallen to a trend where other social websites keep molding to the public but unfortunately this has not been the case with MySpace. MySpace has been stuck in a sort of a rut which has not helped at all. The funny thing is that a lot of the things that make Facebook so great started in MySpace. So why is it that MySpace can not seem to catch a break? I completely agree with you, MySpace needs to get on the ball or risk disappearing completely.
ReplyDelete