once-fading MySpace in midst of youthful reincarnation
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Enlarge By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY





REBRANDING MYSPACE


By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
BEVERLY HILLS — Facebook thumped it, and Twitter threatens it as a source for entertainment news and real-time searches.
But MySpace, nestled in the entertainment capital of the world, thinks it can survive — even thrive — as a repository for all things music, Avatar and Twilight for the under-35 crowd.

"It would be silly to count us out," says Jason Hirschhorn, who, with Mike Jones, runs the company as co-president. They replaced Owen Van Natta, who was jettisoned as CEO last month after less than 10 months on the job.

"There is a pulse of pop culture on MySpace," says Hirschhorn, a former MTV exec. "It is the place where 100 million people congregate, and hundreds of thousands sign up every day,"

They have their work cut out. MySpace, a unit of News Corp. Digital, has stumbled through two CEO resignations in the past year, while Facebook and Twitter surged. (Van Natta's predecessor, Chris DeWolfe, left in April 2009.) Nonetheless, MySpace remains one of the Internet's most enduring brands. It is profitable, and it is expected to haul in more than $350 million in revenue this year — mostly from ads.

Hirschhorn acknowledges that every major brand goes through plateaus, but says the strong ones overcome them. He and Jones concede that MySpace's online traffic had flattened last spring, user engagement was down, and its products lacked focus and vision. But with an ambitious rebranding now underway, they foresee a renewal in its fortunes. The company is hiring engineers designers and marketers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

MySpace is moving back to its original DNA: appealing to self-expressive, creative under-35-year-olds who are into games, music and movies. More than half of MySpace's estimated 100 million users are 25 and younger, according to market researcher ComScore. The 13-to-34-year-old demographic spends 84% of all user time on the service.

MySpace intends to appeal to that demographic with a mantra of "Discover and be discovered," a fancy way of saying it wants to be the online venue to find new friends, movie trailers, little-known bands and social games.

The rebranding is illustrated in design mockups splashed across the walls of a user-experience lab here: Simple, clean pages with vibrant looks designed to draw artists, hard-core social-media users, brand managers and others. There is even talk of a new company logo.

In its pursuit of customers, MySpace has reinvented itself in several ways:

•New user home pages, released last month, are heavy on live personal content, but without the clutter once associated with the original MySpace design. "The product got too big and congested," Jones says, looking at a simplified new interface mockup. "It became unfocused."

•Forthcoming profiles for celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Angelina Jolie are easier to navigate and offer encyclopedic data on their subjects.

•Social-gaming firm Playdom is helping MySpace reinvigorate its gaming channel. This month, it launches Wild Ones, a shoot-'em-up already available on Facebook, on MySpace. More games, including ones exclusive to MySpace, are on the way. "Thirty percent of our users play games; we think it should be at least 50%," says Jones, a former AOL exec.

•Through its constant tweets on Twitter, MySpace has developed into a heavy-duty entertainment news service for music, celebrities and youth-oriented movies such as New Moon and Alice in Wonderland. Twitter and MySpace have also synched services, so tweets or status updates on one service are automatically duplicated on the other.

MySpace is not only reinventing itself, but recasting the competitive climate. "When we think about Twitter and Facebook, we don't think about competition as much as we think about partnership, distribution and synchronization," Hirschhorn says.

Yet can MySpace — once the undisputed king of social networking — remain relevant as a scaled-down Web portal for music and entertainment news? Industry analysts, including Debra Aho Williamson, aren't so sure. They say MySpace faces an obstacle course of competitors, starting with the omnipresent Facebook and now including Google Buzz.

"For months we've heard about the company's plan to refocus on its historic roots in music and entertainment," says Williamson, of market researcher eMarketer. "But the turnaround has been painfully slow, and this shakeup will only reinforce the perception that MySpace can't be fixed."

Though millions of people use MySpace Music, the company "clearly needs to find its next big" thing, says Richard Greenfield, an analyst at investment brokerage BTIG. "This is no easy task and may require a meaningful acquisition, maybe of a social-gaming company like Zynga or a start-up."

Since Facebook's audience overtook MySpace last May — 70.3 million unique users vs. 70.2 million — it has widened its lead dramatically. Today, Facebook boasts 400 million members, about four times as many as MySpace.

As audiences melt from MySpace, so are marketers, says researcher eMarketer. Facebook will surpass MySpace in advertising revenue this year for the first time — a year earlier than expected, it says.

EMarketer estimates ad spending on MySpace will fall 21% this year, to $385 million, worldwide. It expects Facebook to rake in $605 million in ads worldwide this year, up 39% from 2009. If not for a three-year, $900 million search deal with Google that is set to expire by midyear, MySpace's revenue would be lower, Williamson says.

MySpace's Jones says his company is still in discussions with Google to possibly extend the deal, or it could partner with others in the future.

"MySpace has been good at monetization, and others notice that," he says.

Privately held Facebook, by comparison, could vacuum up $700 million to $1.1 billion in revenue this year, based on estimates from analysts including Forrester Research's Augie Ray. However, Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, says $350 million to $500 million is more accurate.

"MySpace rested on their laurels, got complacent and failed to innovate," says Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at market researcher Altimeter Group.

Return to its roots

Facebook's dominance notwithstanding, MySpace and others can thrive in fragmented spaces, such as music and entertainment news, says Eric Mandl, head of large-cap tech banking at UBS.

MySpace remains a force in music. More than 13 million bands, from Pearl Jam to garage bands, find it a vibrant tool to communicate with fans.

"Their brand was born in the music community, as a hub for attracting bands and fans," says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, an online music service."There still is a tremendous loyalty toward MySpace, and it is a monster audience. They were the first mass destination and home for DYI artists. Bands remember that."

And, yes, MySpace's appeal lingers for celebrities and creative types.

Cindy Margolis, a former Playboy Playmate with 16,000 people on her MySpace fan page, still finds it a useful marketing tool. It is part of her PR strategy to promote her Fox Reality Channel show, Seducing Cindy. She also uses Facebook and a personal website.

"To keep my loyal cyberbuddies, I need MySpace," she says. "It is a huge vehicle to gain, and maintain, thousands of followers. Facebook is more intimate. They are two different spaces."

"It's great to get feedback on the shows that I do, which can be complicated," says Bobby Roth, who has directed episodes of Prison Break, Lost and FlashForward. He has 10,000 friends on MySpace.

MySpace's enduring appeal to millions, with the backing of Fox, has not been lost on software developers like Jon Siegal, CEO of Fan Appz, a Facebook application that helps celebrities and athletes market themselves to fans. Siegal and others are interested in working with MySpace.

"The game isn't over for (MySpace)," Owyang says. "They still have a strong foothold, the opportunity to try new tactics, if their management team — and internal culture — can quickly come into alignment."

Says Hirschhorn, "We will always be culturally relevant. And we'll be here in five, 10, years."

It's all about Facebook, baby.

MySpace is still good as a platform for upcoming bands and stuff, but Facebook has eclipsed it as far as social networking purposes go. Or as Seth Meyers said on SNL, "MySpace is hoping to reinvent itself into something more relevant and not the abandoned amusement park of the Internet it currently is."

Acrylic said:

I don't like Facebook.
I have, however, slowed down my usage on MySpace, too. I've had the same page forever... I'm so over changing my layout.
Now I only use it to keep in touch with a couple of friends.

Lots of users, or rather, members, but how many are like me? I have 2 accounts and never use either of them.

Much prefer Facebook.

screw these bullshit sites..

Acrylic said:

ditto

Acrylic said:

Yeah, and in another 3 years it will be all about something else. It's a fad.

I'm sure there's more to Myspace than what I'm about to talk about, but um...

I went back and was there temporarily. It just seems so run down and lonely now. Bands have a better shot on Facebook or starting a ning site. When I was on there, I kept getting lewd messages. I mean outright "hey baby let me..." and "aye ma, can I...." like I wasn't even a person. I guess they thought the big girl would be honored. Nah. I just felt....ick. I didn't want to shut off non-friend messages, but people made it so hard. It was like they couldn't read or something. I made it quite clear I wasn't there to hook up.

So to me, Myspace is just this hookup central. People showing off their naughty bits, writing dirty messages, and meeting up to screw. And this lady has no interest in that. So I left, again, realizing just why I left in the first place. It's a dead zone and the horny teens and desperate adults have taken over. People who may be there for valid reasons seem to be overshadowed in all that filth.

This is how I feel about Myspace--



Just knock it off, take it out back, and shoot the poor dying animal. Or turn it into a site like Yuwie and let the members fend for themselves.

ya but ummmm i met my babe off a dating website so im thankful for that. besides that i just didn't thrill me after that...
[Edited 3/9/10 23:15pm]

i still fucks with myspace . don't see the big deal about facebook and never really even looked at twitter .

purplepolitician said:

I still very much prefer myspace to facebook . It's a shame that facebook is so much more popular now. And I have never been to twitter in my life.

Serious said:

I love the concept of an Internet portal where you can personalize it to your own preferences.

However, some of the profiles take forever to load, the entire website is buggy, and the blog feature is irritating because you can doo an RSS feed from blogspot into it. In other words if you want your blogspot blog to be presented by myspace, you have to repost the information on myspace.

The security features at one time really sucked though they're getting better. Facebook is still ahead of the game that way.

It's a shame too, since facebook is really quite bland. But at least facebook works when you log into it.

purplepolitician said:

http://www.myspace.com/martina_s7

Myspace is just good for advertising or for artists to put up their music etc... for personal pages Facebook can't be beat....

Myspace even copied them by doing the whole 'feed' thingy but it's just not the same.

I do think Facebook is a bit homo too with everyone literally writing everything they do.... "gone to take a shit"..... "eating chicken drumsticks for dinner".... who cares lol

Serious said:

Count me in this group... even tho I'm not there as much, I still like it better. No interest in Twitter.

chocolate1 said:

ernestsewell said:

That's what I think too. 5 years ago everybody had to have a MySpace page, now it's all about Facebook. What difference does it make? Sure I have a facebook page that I created a year after I graduated from college but I barely even log on to it now. In fact, Facebook keeps sending me emails alerting me to all the friend requests and messages that are unopened in my account. I'm just to busy to keep up with other people's business online. I was even thinking of disabling my page. I was only using it to connect with people I haven't seen since high school and middle school, but really, if you are that important to me, you already have my cell number.

•New user home pages, released last month, are heavy on live personal content, but without the clutter once associated with the original MySpace design. "The product got too big and congested," Jones says, looking at a simplified new interface mockup. "It became unfocused."

good move. All the script and garbage on a lot of people's pages made them unreadable unless you had 2gbs of ram or more. Really cluttered and annoying.
Haven't been there in quite some time.
Facebook is just the opposite. The page layout very simple but it's kinda bland and boring.

Fury said:

Yes. But you can come over to my space antime your scantily clad good self wants to.

MySpace Music is a melting pot 4 worms and viruses. I went there once a couple months ago.... next thing I know, my PC is infected with NetSky, and I damn near lost everything on my computer. Never again.

I've wondered about this since June of 2008. I love MySpace, particularly because if you have a working knowledge of CSS & HTML, the profiles are so customizable! There is an absolute art to keeping your profile interesting, without causing it to overwhelm Internet browsers.

But I've noticed over the past year & a half that interest has waned (...not mine however). I never get tired of redesigning my page, adding fresh content, switching the music around, or expressing myself in my blog. So while I find it a bit sad that MySpace is not as popular as it once was, personally; I still have a great time on that site. Though I will admit that my "great time" comes from what I put into it, not from what I get from other MySpace "friends".

I dumped my account months ago. I never went there, anyway.

paisley2002 said:

I hear of those stories, from many friends, but despite the fact that I'm ALL OVER MySpace, on a daily basis, yet I've never encountered any of those problems. Perhaps because I don't play those "apps", and I block them all. I believe it's those "apps" that cause all the problems some people experience.

Fury said:

Set the animated glitter gifs to stun!