It was in the news in June. MySpace had fired 30% of its staff to cut costs to compensate for falling advertising revenue and market share gains by Facebook. Facebook, the social-networking leader worldwide with 307 million users, surpassed MySpace in the U.S. last month, reaching 70.28 million, according to comScore. Today, MySpace has about 126.9 million users globally, including 70.26 million in the U.S.
MySpace has suffered a continuous drop in visitor traffic and is now less than half the size of Facebook. Three MySpace executives recently quit the one-time darling of the internet and there is speculation its co-founders will follow.
What happened to MySpace?
In 2005, MySpace was the Place for Friends. It was the hippest place to hang out online. The site led the Web 2.0 revolution in which users could customize their Internet experience by creating their own profile pages and sharing content with friends. NewsCorp‘s Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace for $580m was viewed as yet another example of his business acumen as membership continued to soar. Also, MySpace had also laid waste to Friendster which was the place to be at before MySpace. By creating a new paradigm and allowing the benefit of customization, MySpace grabbed market share and retained it for a while. Then Facebook came along.
Facebook, which restricted membership to college students only when it initially launched, soon opened its doors to everyone. Bebo also played a role is grabbing some of the spoils. And, Twitter with its addictive live feed micro blogs was the final nail in the coffin as folks looking for a ‘quick voyeuristic fix navigated towards it.
What NewsCorp did wrong with MySpace :
1. It’s a social network not an Ad network:
Try telling that to NewsCorp’s army of vampire media sellers who bundled in the digital marketing packages with their TV and Radio deals. the result was that MySpace suddenly had flashing banners and rich media offerings and every kind of IAB approved ad box sizes selling cars and insurance to its users.
2. No brand building:
One of the biggest mistakes that most companies do when they acquire another company is that they tend to forget that in addition to market share, they’re also buying a brand. So, they integrate the acquired company’s products into their stable of offerings and slowly phase out the purchased brand. There was no focus on conscious brand building efforts or on improving the user experience on MySpace.
3. No scaling-up of features:
MySpace was created for 15 year olds and the entertainment industry and unfortunately, rather than expand the site to appeal to the mainstream market, NewsCorp let it stay that way. MySpace profiles were not tailored for marketing a business and if a company created a profile, it stood out of place. This was because unless the company was part of the entertainment industry, it wouldn’t get the specialized profile options that a singer, band or filmmaker got. A company opening an account on MySpace would get were the same features that a 15 year old received. It’s hard to see how a company like “Constant Contact ” see image below, would fill in the “Who I’d like to meet” field or find the right kind of ‘friends’ to join their MySpace page.
To be fair to MySpace though, they did beef up their hyper-targeted advertising campaigns interface, but it’s a case to too little, too late for the wrong reasons.
4. No Spam Control:
My Space is now a network of spammers and if a business wants to legitimately use MySpace’s network to market its products, it will be perceived as a spammer and will lose brand credibility. My Space should have invested in shoring up its back-end controls to ensure that spammers didn’t have free rein in affecting the user experience adversely.
5. Lack of standardization:
True, MySpace’s unique proposition was the ability for a user to stand out from the crowd by creating a customized MySpace page for themselves. The problem was that not everyone was design oriented and the result was a flurry of amateurish glitter enhanced, do-it-yourself backgrounds that were painful to the eye and set Internet design standards back by 20 years. In contrast, Facebook’s standard interface was a treat and delivered a consistent user experience as opposed to MySpace’s post-industrial-garage look.
The Internet which has had a history of fickleness and faddish followings has now done to MySpace what it did to Friendster, AOL and Netscape. Very little brand loyalty exists on the Internet for now and today, for something to survive on the Internet, it needs to prove its functional credibility. The fall of these one-time online cultural icons is not over yet. Tomorrow, if Twitter with its very basic interface does not innovate sufficiently, it could well join the ranks of these fallen icons.
Time will tell…
