News Corp. digital chief: MySpace 'kind of stopped'
SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.
"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."
And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."
The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.
And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.
"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."
It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.
"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."
FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
Put it this way - Google can't catch them, and believe me they're trying.
Once you lose in this kind of thing, you never get it back. Just ask Friendster.
There is nothing i enjoy about facebook, it has a bland homogenized feel, i just wished that myspace to unify its and execute a little more control over user content, but id still rather have an open environment to facebook's "walled garden".
The whole point of Facebook is to connect you with people, not "create an online identity", which is where MySpace's customizable html is supposed to come in. That's where MySpace and so many other social networking sites went off the rails. Facebook used to explicitly forbid you from creating a false identity online that was different than your real one. They now only actively discourage it, but the fact that 95% of the users there use their real ID's means there's tremendous peer pressure. And when you're using your real identity, there's no need to "advertise" yourself with funky layouts or graphics. Your friends like you for who you are.
MySpace was great at creating superficial relationships between people who didn't know each other. That's fine if your goal in life is to brag about how you have 500,000 MySpace friends. But most people are not like that. Most people just want to connect with their real life friends, and that's what Facebook is all about.
What's worse is that Myspace has the stigma of automatically bringing to mind annoying blinking animated gifs and being populated with teenagers who never passed a grammar course.
Change the name...the name is well known, but it's more infamy than fame.
Lets not forget that Newscorp wants to start charging for shows on Hulu, Horse s h i t, the minute they charge for the limited shows that are now free, Pffft no more customers.
I hate using ad hominem arguements, but are you suggesting we illegally watch the tv shows from other sources?
- by Allegory101 October 24, 2009 3:51 PM PDT
- ahem...google wave anyone, will basically be a chatroom with instant everything.
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