In this episode of Digital Journal TV, we take you inside MySpace to get their reaction on competition from the ultimate F-word (Facebook), how the company believes Google can help them grow, and what the future holds for this social networking behemoth.
MySpace is arguably the godfather of social networks. The site attracts more than 110 monthly active users around the world and the company says it’s the most trafficked site in the U.S. MySpace is also localized and translated in 20 different international territories.
But company execs have no doubt been screaming a certain F-word recently: Facebook. The competition is heating up between these two social networking giants, and MySpace is not about to sit back and read about its demise in a news feed.
The growing threat from Facebook finally got News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch to talk about it, albeit in a we-are-better sort of way.
While delivering the company’s quarterly profit results, Murdoch said, “Obviously MySpace’s most talked about competitor is Facebook. While it has grown rapidly over the past several months, it is still only 45 per cent of MySpace in terms of unique users.”
Murdoch went on to say the two platforms are very different for the user. “MySpace pages become a home on the Internet, it’s where they discover people, content and culture,” he said. “Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a Web utility, similar to a phone.”
But MySpace also faces growing challenges from countless other social networks, as the Internet is littered with competition.
However, a lot of experts saying the social networking battle will rest heavily on how much it’s adopted by advertisers. MySpace earned some points in this area this week with the launch of a new ad platform that targets advertising more effectively, as well as allowing local businesses a chance to get in the game.
“Performance lifts 300 per cent for those using hyper targeting,” Murdoch boasted.
The company also announced a partnership with Google’s OpenSocial network recently, which provides a lot of potential for future growth, but it forces the company to indirectly have the same features as the competition.
In this episode of Digital Journal TV, we take you inside MySpace to find out how they plan to address the aggressive and growing Facebook, how the company believes Google can help them grow through OpenSocial, and what the future holds for this social networking behemoth.
Bonus!
For all you social networking junkies out there, we’ve collected a list of current stats from MySpace:
– MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe.
– MySpace is the most trafficked site on the Internet in the U.S.
– 85 per cent of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older).
– 1 in 4 Americans is on MySpace, in the UK it’s as common to have a MySpace as it is to own a dog.
– On average, 300,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day.
– In September 2007, MySpace broke a record, with 4.5 billion pageviews to the site in one day.
– MySpace is localized and translated in more than 20 international territories, including U.S., UK, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, MySpace en Espanol, Latin America, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.
– MySpace is one of the fastest growing websites of all time,
with 14 billion comments, 20 billion private messages, 50 million emails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail or Google), 10 billion friend relationships, 1.5 billion images (8 million images are uploaded every day) and more than 60,000 new videos uploaded to MySpaceTV each day.
