News Corp. describes MySpace as the premier lifestyle portal for connecting with friends, discovering popular culture, and making a positive impact on the world. By integrating web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, music streaming, music videos, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities, and member forums, MySpace has created a connected COMMUNITY.
One of the main purposes of any business is to move from out the red, past the break even, into the black (making MONEY). MySpace and the conglomerate behind it have happily shown this to be true; however, the majority of the MySpace COMMUNITY, full of people like myself, have come to realize it’s not worth our time. All we ever wanted was to go online and check what our friends were doing…simple right? But now, we go online and receive a constant stream of SPAM, along with mail regarding nothing that has to do with us. Our COMMUNITY has gotten lost inside the jungle of bubble gum advertisement and dumb promotions because the folks at MySpace have turned you, me, and others into a dollar sign.
The main problem is that the MySpace fellas failed to realize that they are actually dealing with human beings… with brains. Most of these human beings didn’t enjoy the fact that MySpace turned itself into a 24/7 commercial. Let’s be real people! Who really likes commercials? The only time I EVER enjoy commercials is during the Super Bowl. At this point is when MySpace began losing users to its rival Facebook and the up and coming Twitter (which as of right now has found NO way to make money…but we’re not mad). To help you understand this issue a little deeper I decided to do a little digging. In this article I’m going to discuss the side of MySpace many of you have probably never heard about.
A New York Times article was published September 16, 2006. The article was based on the writings of Trent Lapinski, a 20-year-old blogger and journalism student, that had been investigating MySpace since July 2005, when the News Corporation bought it. I have an exerpt from the NY Times article below. It read:
‘…Headed by C.E.O., founder, and chairman Brad Greenspan, eUniverse (now Intermix Media), was a multimillion-dollar marketing and entertainment company known for sites like Skilljam.com, pop-up advertising, unsolicited mass e-mails, spyware, and the adware behind controversial peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa.’
Two men from a company called ResponseBase — which, like eUniverse, was the target of many complaints about spamming — came to eUniverse when that company purchased ResponseBase in 2002. They were Chris DeWolfe, the current chief executive of MySpace, and Tom Anderson, the first ”friend” of MySpace members.T he three men were members of Friendster, the social-networking site that preceded MySpace, and they used that site as a template for MySpace, but with the focus on commerce rather than networking, Mr. Lapinski said.
Mr. Lapinski said MySpace’s initial popularity came not from word-of-mouth, as is often assumed, but from an intense e-mail campaign. From there, Mr. Lapinski details the already well-known, drama-fraught deal to sell Intermix to News Corporation last year. He describes the current MySpace as more of a marketing tool than a social-networking site.
Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal wrote that nearly everything in the article is old: It is ‘well known in the marketing world that the parent company which sold MySpace to News Corporation was not a band of do-gooders.’
A San Francisco Business Times article stated, “Twitter famously makes no money, at least not yet, despite other companies making plenty of money off the back of the micro-blogging service. MySpace trended the other way, putting money at the top of the agenda and suffering as a result. Not surprising when it’s part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation conglomerate.”
Well, now you might be asking who is Rupert Murdoch? Rupert Murdoch is a global media mogul and a major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). News Corp. is one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Their holdings include The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, and Fox Filmed Entertainment (20th Century Fox’s parent company) to name a few. And in 2005 they added Myspace to the roster.
News Corp. published an article on July 12, 2007 stating:
MySpace today announced that it is outperforming all other social networking sites according to multiple metrics. America’s leading and most trafficked website has crossed the 70 million active monthly unique user mark in the United States, meaning that nearly one in four Americans used MySpace last month, according to newly released data from comScore MediaMetrix… Total time spent on MySpaceby users is three times its closest competitor and the site continues to lead in average minutes spent per person per month with more than 200 minutes on average, according to comScore. Additionally, among teen Internet users MySpace ranks as the brand with the highest overall Differentiation and Brand Stature, according to Young and Rubicam’s industry standard BrandAsset® Valuator.
So it’s no wonder Myspace got greedy! 70 MILLION active monthly users! Following this publication Myspace expanded internationally and eventually created sites like Myspace Latino. MySpace Latino was created in order to target its growing population of U.S.-based Latino users and make it easier for big-name corporations such as McDonald’s and Toyota to advertise to them. According to Quantcast nearly 14 percent of MySpace’s U.S. users are Latino.
The Myspace community had now become a cash cow! So the ads started piling on and WE began to leave slowly but surely. As a result, in a bid to cut costs, MySpace has laid off more than 400 workers, or 30 percent of its staff, in the United States. It also has laid off more abroad. They plan to close at least four international offices and eliminate two-thirds of its staff outside the United States as it tries to adjust to slowing audience growth and falling advertising. MySpace Latino’s VP of Hispanic sales and strategy, Manny Miravete, left the company, and the site’s managing director, Victor Kong, has reportedly left as well. EMarketer predicts that MySpace’s ad revenue this year will drop to $520 million from $605 million last year. And outside the United States, advertising has barely caught on; EMarketer expects it to total only $25 million this year.
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