Much has been said about MySpace’s gradual decline in the social networking space. Sure we cannot deny that overall traffic is down, they have lost out on the Google advertising package that was their main source of revenue, but I think we are far from attending it’s funeral.
Its not so much that Facebook has taken away its traffic, I feel that Facebook was what people were looking for in a social network in the first place. MySpace was the first successful network and nothing will take that away from them. People were looking for a place to store and share elements of their life with friends and family no matter where they are. And MySpace provided that service. It even allowed users to add their own personal touch to the pages, no matter what design/HTML skills they possessed.
What really exploded MySpace was that celebrities, predominately musicians, had a cheap, easy and effective way to communicate with fans and promote their artistry. Fans got the added benefit of being able to communicate to their idols (or their idol’s PR firm) online and show that to the world. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Facebook meanwhile was working on a platform that did something extremely well. A place to communicate and find lost friends with a clean and generic interface. The added protection of the wall preventing search engines and people accessing the accounts unless they were a “real” friend - a clear benefit of those sick of the MySpace stalkers and worried about their privacy.
And I guess Myspace was the only place for these normal everyday people to do that until Facebook. The only ones that were truely benefiting was the musicians and the spammers. So this gradual migration to Facebook has occurred over the last couple of years. And for most it is coming as a suprise, or at least they did not expect the migration to happen so quickly.
Facebook obiviously now is going against Twitter, which took one element of Facebook and doing that feature extremely well. What will become of that is yet to be seen.
So where does that leave MySpace?
It should be continuing to serve the users that have stuck by them and used the service to its full potential: musicians and celebrities. Why not save costs and take advantage of the MySpace platform, the API, the bandwidth, the hosting, and the features rather than charge out to 3rd party web developers? You can have that idea for free record labels.
Viacom are pretty smart themselves, wanting to merge MySpace and MTV. It’s a match made in heaven and I don’t know why anyone didn’t take them up on the offer earlier.
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