Follow Up: MySpace is Finished
I received a great deal of email from folks who had thoughts on my previous post, MySpace is Finished. Unfortunately, I wrote something that generated a lot of interest and my database craps out on me causing the comments not to work. But I do appreciate the people who took the time to drop me an email with their thoughts, thank you. Since others could not see all the emails I received and all the questions that were raised, I thought I would post a follow up.
Several emails I received said pretty much, “MySpace is free and you get what you pay for.” This I find very hard to agree with. Even though we do not pay to become a member of MySpace or any other social network for that matter, we as users give MySpace something far more valuable than a few dollars. We give them our time and attention. Think about the amount of time people spend within the MySpace walls and community? For a business that makes their revenues through online advertising, there is nothing more important. And for that reason alone, MySpace should have a singular focus on delivering the best user experience possible on their site for their members. In my opinion, not only does MySpace not deliver a good user experience, the web site has terrible navigation, atrocious look and feel and more error messages than a beta version of Windows Vista. How does a web site expect to continually grow when the product your selling, your web site, is broken to say the very least?
MySpace even after continued attempts has non-stop spam going through every facet of the web site. There is no enforcement or pro-activeness to try to stop the deluge of profile, comment and email spam. All of this adds up to only one thing, a terrible user experience.
What this says to me is that MySpace is forgetting who is truly important to them – their members! Because without you and I and the millions of other members coming on daily and updating our blogs, adding new content to our profile pages, sending emails to friends, etc, etc. They have no business.
Now let’s look at this in another way. I am assuming most of my readers are marketers. MySpace recently announced a new targeted advertising program that they call “Interest targeting” which they will be pulling content from members profiles and based on what that user has written on his page, MySpace will tailor ads towards that content. This should not come to a big surprise to anyone as everyone is moving into that direction. I guess my question is what type of company would actually take advantage of this service or for that matter any other MySpace service? Even if, my target market were youths as a CEO of a company would I be willing to risk having my brand being advertised on profile pages that could have a picture of a half naked woman on it or a guy with a picture of a swastika? Who would be willing to jeopardize their brand by advertising on MySpace?
This time I am hoping comments are working. 
Technorati Tags: MySpace, social network, online advertising
I am sure there are plenty of brands that would see value in MySpace — they probably just aren’t the brands that I would choose to buy
But, I agree that MySpace has created a monster that will be hard to capitalise upon and it seems to be an endemic problem. There probably was a time when change was possible … but that time may well have passed. This means that the opportunity exists for a new player with a better user experience.
Certainly makes for interesting times.
MySpace clearly has not figured out how to connect with potential advertisers. You would think that there would be lots of businesses that could do something like Bob Dylan is doing on Facebook.
Do people actually pay attention to the ads on MySpace? While I cannot predict what will happen to this networking site, I do think there are other opportunities for advertisers out there. Opportunities that are better than MySpace. Those other opportunities are what will probably be responsible for MySpace’s demise.
Sometimes a big ship is hard to turn. Ya observation that some folks got rich and Newscorp doesn’t know a thing about social media is rather accurate. The question still remains however; kids are the primary power users, will they stay there? Us old folks we got other options, Facebook, and new sites just emerging. The space is still pretty green. The game has yet to be decided, I wouldn’t count Myspace out, maybe just minimized. Peace!
Great post. Lets face it. The founder cashed out (nice payday)and MySpace despite whatever Fox says is likely the responsibility of some MBA who does not know squat about a good internet experience.
One the other hand maybe they know all they need to know for a media company, which is what they are now.
Why should they care about those poor performing adSense ads or the user experience for that matter?
What they do care about are those reported billions of eyes that land on the site every month broken down by gender, age, interest, location, time spent online, etc. Get the point.