MySpace has fired 30% of its workforce, or about 400 people, just as parent company News Corp. scrapped a $350 million plan to consolidate it in a new office with the other components of Fox Interactive Media.
Most of the business coverage sites blame falling advertising sales and traffic gains by Facebook. As you may know, News Corp. is busy implementing a strategic overhaul to combat these two issues, having recruited a new CEO for all its digital operations from AOL (an expert in falling ad sales), and one for MySpace from Facebook (adept at prompting visits that make it no money).
Think about this for a minute: AOL tumbled from a valuation of $136 billion when it was bought in the 1990s by Time Warner, to something under $6 billion today (TW is trying to dump it)In the meantime, services like Facebook and Twitter have captured an inordinate amount of consumers' time: Facebook users in the U.S. alone chalked up 13.9 billion minutes on the site in April, 2009, while the nearly 300 minutes on Twitter were an increase of 3,712% over the same period last yearFacebook and Twitter haven't yet figured out how to make money.
Twitter's founders have said they don't even care to try. MySpace is failing to make money competing with companies that give stuff away for free? Humm. Talk about a thankless proposition.I've got to say that Rupert Murdoch deserves a lot of credit for taking it on. It's scary that trying to make money is such an exceptional idea. Doesn't anybody remember the Dot Com Bubble? I bet it must drive Murdoch nuts that none of the business media coverage, nor expert [sic] analysis, ever points out the dichotomy of a for-profit endeavor competing in an industry that isn't really an industry, but more of a free lunch.
What are they competing on? Favorable media clips?So maybe MySpace shouldn't look to said "industry" for ideas on what to do...any more than it should have looked to the archaic business of ad placement as a way to accomplish anything more than muck up its U/I.
Here's what it might consider instead:Find a purpose. Lose the "a place for friends" tagline. It's like subheading Ford with "vehicles for driving," or "Chicago, a place where there are buildings." Then, define a purpose for the the space, or series of purposes. Think something between a political campaign and a video game: the site's foundation in music might be a good place to start. Dare to declare it, like "we're going to find a million bands" or "listen to endless music," or whateverBuild a community.
The latest reports on bloggers and Twitter users who create content for social media are far less than inspiring, and Facebook's lackluster user turnout to vote on a major structural change suggests that 1) most users are watchers, and 2) their presence is less about being in a community, and more like sitting in front of a TV watching Gilligan's Island.
A purpose for MySpace could be the prompt for visitors to actually do things that are unique and/or exclusive to the site. Make membership mean somethingNix the exploitation. Stop the presses...MySpace isn't an ad channel, it's a place where people do things (check old tagline for a hint). The opportunity is to monetize their behavior, not try to distract from it with advertising.
If the site were a place that people did things that had a purpose, you might actually be able to make those activities profitable. The flip side would be an opportunity to clean up all the ads that currently clutter the site.I know I'm just throwing out the thoughts of a dim bulb, and the details behind my three bullet points would be many and complex.But the bright bulbs haven't really produced such shining results, have they?
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