Myspace’s fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth
How Twitter ate MySpace’s lunch
There are plenty of reasons for MySpace’s fade — technical troubles, bad PR, intrusive advertising and security issues — but one of the site’s biggest problems was the emergence of more specialized, less-cluttered social tools such as Twitter and Tumblr, according to this article. MySpace’s managers aimed for the right targets, but their upstart rivals ultimately proved nimbler and leaner, says Kent Lindstrom, former CEO of Friendster. “MySpace spent all their time working on tools … like media players, playlists, video. It turned out you didn’t really need all of that,” Lindstrom says.
Read more: Bloomberg Businessweek (6/22)
- * In 2006, Jeremy Jackson—the buff, bronzed former Baywatch child star—couldn’t imagine a world without Myspace.
“I tried to cling to Myspace for a long time, hoping that someone there would come up with some idea to keep it alive,” says Jackson, 30. “But my assistants and business partners finally beat it into my head that it was a dead horse. It’s done. It’s a joke. If you do stuff on Myspace, you just look sad.”
- * At its December 2008 peak, Myspace attracted 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). By May of this year that number had dropped to 34.8 million.
- * Many Myspace pages appear to be host bodies for the worst kinds of advertising parasites.
- * Mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders have accelerated Myspace’s fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth—one that promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture—to an afterthought.
Without good content, users won’t use the service. It’s really that simple. For MySpace to make a comeback and be relevant, they should look to partner with serious recording studios and major artists. You’re going to say, well, they already do that. Of course they do, but what’s missing is the benefit for the end-user. How about record contracts? Free music? Exclusive deals to concerts?
