David Emery OnlineYet another post on the inevitable death of MySpace
11 April 2007
MySpace is screwed.
Either a) they don’t realise or b) they do, but don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
PhotoBucket Videos Blocked on MySpace
Now, this is – on the face of it – not really a huge deal in itself. PhotoBucket is an incredibly popular site, with more people uploading pictures to it then Flickr, but it’s a very small fish in the online video world. To compound it, a large proportion of PhotoBucket’s images traffic comes by way of MySpace, as it’s the site of choice for image hosting among the MySpace crowd.
This move, then, is just MySpace trying to prevent PhotoBucket getting a foothold in an area that MySpace is interested in.
Which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
MySpace is now at a very important crossroads. On the one hand, they have a very very large userbase which is still growing. On the other, further growth like they’ve achieved previously is going to be extremely difficult, and they now have quite a few competitors snapping at their heals (more on them later).
In other words, they have the Friendster problem.
For those with a purely short-term memory, Friendster was the hip cool place where all the cool kids hung out online. You could set youself up a profile, post up pictures, text and link yourself up with your friends. It had huge amounts of traffic, and lots of media buzz, before it was trumped by a hip-er, younger upstart.
Sound familiar?
Just as all the kids left Friendster for MySpace – for no other reason then because it was trendy – the same is going to happen to MySpace.
Oh. Wait.
Did I say going to?
I meant has.
It’s already started; Bebo is already more popular (or at least as popular) in the UK as MySpace, and is making interesting deals left right and centre, like the recent deal with 7digital. However, I think the real site that’s going to be the “MySpace killer” is Facebook. Since opening up their signups to everybody late last year, they seem to be really gaining traction with the early adopter types.
Facebook really feels right now like YouTube did in 2005 – lots of dotted recommendations and “oh, this is kind of interesting” blog posts all over the place.
So, back to the original point; MySpace really needs to be embracing its very sizeable community at the moment, not turning it away because it feels threatened. The only – and I really mean only – way for them to stay relevant is to entrench their community by helping it to build a stable ecosystem around it – otherwise they’re just going to up and leave. Sure, MySpace is not going to see a massive drop in traffic immediately – even GeoCities still has reasonable traffic – but unless they rethink their stratergy, and stop being so greedy, they’re done for.