A new executive team is trying to bring MySpace back to its former glory. By focusing on music, videos and games, it hopes to recapture some of its luster. With the MySpace refugees mounting, it's time for some new blood to make some brilliant, future-changing decisions. This week, the company is holding a conference for its global ad sales team to explore ways to bring in traffic and beef up ad spending.
MySpace is poised to haul in $495 million in ad revenue this year, down 15% from last year's $585 million, according to research firm eMarketer. In August, MySpace attracted 64.2 million unique visitors from the United States, off 15% from August 2008, according to comScore, while Facebook pulled in 92.2 million unique U.S. visitors – up more than 100% year-over-year.
After spending a brief time at the top of the social networking pyramid, MySpace is staring down the same challenge that other major online media destinations are trying to sort out: how to remain relevant to a fickle audience that will find everything it wants ... somewhere. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) are trying to reinvent themselves.
Once a place where users could meet for any social purpose, MySpace has come under stiff competition from Facebook and Twitter, among others, and is now focusing on becoming an entertainment destination, where visitors meeting for reasons related to entertainment content. MySpace has had some good luck with its music features, and choosing a niche that can bring in enthusiasts who can hang with the like-minded is always a good way to push the traffic stats up. MySpace Music was good for 24.8 million U.S. unique visitors in September, a 24% gain from the same month a year earlier ... but this success is isolated.
Of course, there are plenty of companies that are eager to pick up a piece of the online entertainment market. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has YouTube, and General Electric's (NYSE: GE) NBC Universal, Walt Disney, (NYSE: DIS) and News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) started joint venture Hulu.
To bolster its case against the competition, MySpace picked up Nada Stirratt, a former MTV executive, to serve as "chief revenue officer" – or uber-salesperson. This is just the latest change to an executive team that has turned over almost completely over the past six months following the arrival of new CEO Owen Van Natta.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-19-2009 @ 11:12AM
Level 5 said...
Myspace will wind up being dead within a few years. The users and the HTML content are what's killing it. Too much spam in the form of obnoxious banner ads, profiles with 20+ MB of videos, pictures, scrolling flash collages. It's ridiculous, that's why I rarely mess with Myspace. I stick to Facebook. The ads are more discreet, although still can get a bit much and I don't have to worry about a million privacy settings in order for my page not to be a media content black hole.