Josh Benner

Tag: MySpace

  • Myspace sold, Justin Timberlake part of buying group

    I wonder how many people were unaware that this is the current logo for Myspace

    The former king of social networking, Myspace is going to be sold to advertising firm – Specific Media.

    The cost? $35 million.

    To appreciate that cost, there are a few things that must be known:
    -News Corp. boutht the site in 2005 for $580 million (News Corp owns the likes of Fox, Fox News, Fox Sports, Hulu, 49% of the Big Ten Network, and a lot of other stations, websites, etc).
    -In 2006, MySpace was projected at being worth 10-20 billion by the year 2009.
    -In 2006, MySpace reached 100 million accounts. At the time, Facebook had just 10 million users.
    -Over the last several months, News Corp. had been trying to sell the site for a $100 million price tag, and yesterday, they parted with it at the bargain price of $35 million. But there’s a problem.

    While $35 million is a far cry from its previous evaluations and while it may appear to be a steal relative to the asking price, I tihnk News Corp is getting the better end of the deal.

    Why? Because Myspace is irrelevant. The site has about as much action as the Chernobyl power grid. For News Corp, it is no longer their headache. $35 million may seem relativly cheap in the tech world, but it’s $35 million for a website that has not been viable in three years.

    One of the key players in the deal is actor and pop star, Justin Timberlake. He is going to be one of the major creative forces behind the rebranding of MySpace.

    I’m sure Timberlake is an inteligent guy, but if he were serious about getting into social networking, I think a better route into the business would have been creating something new. Not getting involved with something that has already has the stygma for being a site that no one uses, save for indie bands that no one has ever heard of.

    Timberlake will be a creative influence on the site’s efforts to rebrand. Again, that may sound well and good, but Myspace has tried to rebrand multiple times over the past couple of years, and they have kept failing. I also think a website admitting that they are rebranding is not a good strategy. I feel like it’s basically saying, “We’re not relevant, but we’re working to fix that.”

    What’s this rebrand going to be anyway? A platform where you can control your online social network, share music, photos, and video with your friends while connecting with new people?

    That’s basically the jist of their last couple of rebranding efforts, and I feel that the site is going to inevitably try to recreate itself as what it already is.

    I’ve written about Myspace before. I think the reason why it is such an interesting topic for me is the fact that it is an amazing example of how nothing on the internet is invincible. It’s not just that Myspace isn’t as popular as it used to be. It’s the fact that this site is no longer even relevant.

    Also, I could not help but note the irony in the fact that Timberlake played the founder of Napster, sean Parker in “The Social Network,” which was about Facebook. Parker was heavily critizied by the music industry, but was played by a musician, and now that same musician is one of the top men in a company which used to be even bigger than Facebook.

    jrb

  • MySpace: Finger lickin’ good

    I was checking my emails this morning, and THIS is what I get from Myspace.

    Wow.

    Creativity grade: A+

    I was overwhelmed by the originality of this email blast pertaining to their new push to get people to use their new mobile app. First I read the subject “Myspace Mobile, it’s what’s for dinner.” And then I open the email and it’s a picture of a table with cell phones on it.

    I feel like my response to the “Myspace it’s what’s for dinner” email was about the same as it would have been had I received an email this morning from broccoli saying “Broccoli, I’m what’s for dinner.”

    I would have thought, “This is sad. Broccoli is so removed from reality and so completely not relevant.”

    In all seriousness, I find it ironic that a company who was once king of social networking but is fading into obscurity would have a subject line that quotes a popular catch phrase from the 90s. It’s one thing that used to matter using another antiquated relic of popular culture.

    I argue that a more appropriate email would have been “Myspace: where’s the beef.”

    The app basically does the same sort of things that any other social networking site’s app does (it’s just coming after the big boys have already made apps that people, you know, use).

    I briefly considered getting the app, but I don’t remember my Myspace password.

    Don’t get me wrong, I know that I could easily reset it, but what’s the point? I noticed a change that Myspace made to the layouts. As many people will recall, Myspace pages used to say the date that the person last logged in. They took that down.

    Makes sense to get rid of. Myspace probably doesn’t want people to be profile hopping and noticing that no one has logged in in years.

    Sad. I thnk a lot of us liked having that “last login” back in 2007 as a badge of honor. And now it’s gone.

    jrb

  • MySpace: the AOL of Social Networking

    MySpace isn’t dead. But the social networking website that has been to Facebook what Apollo Creed was to Ivan Drago in “Rocky IV” may want to start looking into hospice care.

    Last spring, Owen Van Natta was named the CEO of MySpace. During the summer, Van Natta brought Katie Geminder over to the MySpace team. Geminder headed the RemakingMySpace project, an aggressive attempt to recreate and rebrand MySpace from the ground up.

    Almost a year worth of work to pull up on the free falling plane, and MySpace is back to square one with the termination of Van Natta on February 10, and Geminder leaving the company at the end of last week. TechCrunch.com reports that new co-president Jason Hirrschorn hated RemakingMySpace from the beginning, and was quick to scratch the project once in power. There have also been numerous other senior employee departures this month.

    MySpace has done whatever it can to erase any memory of the RemakingMySpace project having ever existed.

    Would RemakingMySpace have worked? I don’t know, but with a second total regime change in less than a year, it has been a year wasted. Social networking is very much a “now” competition, and Facebook vs. MySpace has gone from the heated war of coke vs. pepsi to the internal combustion engine vs. the horse and buggy.

    How many times can they completely retool the executive hierarchy of the company and have botched layout retooling projects and still remain relevant? There are more and more social networking websites being created and MySpace is out of site and out of mind. While it doesn’t seem like that long ago that MySpace was the king of all things social networking, the mighty have fallen.

    Is MySpace invincible? Was AOL? It is not exactly the same as the two serve different purposes, but a decade ago, America Online was a leading internet service provider. In many ways, AOL was synonymous with the internet. But where are they now?

    AOL’s popularity peaked between late 2001 and early 2003. Since that time, subscribers have been dropping from over 26 million users to barely five million, and they keep falling.

    On August 9, 2006, MySpace reaches 100 million accounts. At that time, Facebook had roughly 10 million accounts. It is difficult to know exactly how many profiles are on MySpace, but default friend Tom has over 274 million friends (so there are at least that many). You may be inclined to argue, “Wow, that’s a lot of profiles.” I agree that a lot of people have MySpace profiles. It’s just that people don’t use MySpace profiles.

    Facebook is enjoying over 260 billion page views per month. That is 11 times higher than MySpace as the graph from pingdom.com shows.

    The reason why I compare MySpace to AOL is that they both went from the industry standard to relics. Other service providers came along and left AOL in the dust. It became an inferior product. Innovation, which has been the hallmark of sites like Facebook and Google has passed MySpace by. With Facebook building up such a significant worldwide lead, the ultimate feature of both sites is too similar and Facebook has already won. There is potential in other networking sites which provide different function. Twitter with microblogging and Linkedin with being a professional site.

    But what is it that separates Facebook from MySpace? The fact that you can choose some fonts? If anything, the differences in layouts and fonts has done more harm than good as compared to the clean appearance of Facebook. The fact that it is easy to listen to music on MySpace? That isn’t a new feature, and at this point, what has that really done for the site anyway? It is a haven for webpages of bands that nobody listens to.

    And besides, music playing sites like pandora and rhapsody are just as good.

    Last month, I decided to create my own MySpace page. I had one for a few months in college, but decided to deactivate it since I never logged in. I requested several dozen friends of mine as MySpace friends. To this point, SIX of them have accepted my friend requests. Is this there way of telling me that they don’t like me? No. They haven’t accepted my friend request because they have not logged in. Some of these people have not logged onto MySpace in over two years.

    On paper, MySpace may always appear to be one of the social networking leaders, but for practical purposes, they have already been passed by, and are fading into obscurity.

    Like the Romans, and Europe’s domination in Olympic ice dancing, empires never last forever. The posts on MySpace are going out into the unnotice, internet abyss. You can’t spell empty space without “myspace.”

  • You can spell ’empty space’ without MySpace

    Last week in the London Telegraph, I saw this headline:

    “MySpace: is this the beginning of the end?
    The news that MySpace is set to sack a majority of its international workforce, outside of its headquarters in the US, should set alarm bells ringing.”

    Beginning of the end?

    I love you Telegraph, but for MySpace, that was a long time ago. When was the beginning of the end? That’s tough to answer because the former king of social networking has had so many amazing failures over the past three years.

    When Facebook said that anyone could be on Facebook, and there was a mass exodus: that was a pretty big nail in the coffin too.

    I wrote about MySpace last February. At the time, they had execs dropping like all of those birds that have been dropping dead out of the sky this month. They had spent most of 2009 working on a project called Remaking MySpace which was an attempt at totally rebranding the company. It failed and ended with several high ranking execs leaving (including CEO Owen Van Natta).

    Let’s not forget this past fall when Facebook and MySpace decided to work in collaboration. It was announced in November that they were adding Facebook Connect to MySpace. The announcement was made by MySpace CEO Mike Jones along with Facebook VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Dan Rose.

    VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing? But where was Zuck?

    Or number 2 in command? Or number 3? Or 4 or 5?

    That would be like the president of another country visiting the White House and being welcomed to America by the White House family dog.

    The fact that the CEO of MySpace and only a VP from Facebook made the announcement did not go unnoticed. It was an irony that if ever there needed to be closure to who had won the social networking war, there it was.

    Later this week, MySpace is set to announce they are firing roughly half of their entire staff. Most of those firings coming from international employees.

    To show how hard they’ve fallen, in 2006, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore wrote citing Jordan Rohan from the National Bank of Canada who predicted MySpace would be worth $10-20 billion in three years (2009).

    jrb

    questions, or comments? tweet @bennernotes

    The article saying how much MySpace would potentially be worth:

    http://mashable.com/2006/09/27/myspace-worth-20-billion/