The future MySpace brand
MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006
Patricia Sellers writes in Fortune on the founders of MySpace, the zeitgeist of social networking and the past and future brand of the biggest website on the planet.
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With Murdoch's backing, the site has an astonishing number of projects underway: a Google pact to sell text ads on the site; a MySpace Records label; a VoIP feature to let users call one another; international sites in Britain, Australia, France - with nine other countries in Europe and Asia coming soon. DeWolfe counts 20 new products in the development pipeline. "We think we can extend MySpace around the world and it can be a major force globally," says Murdoch, whose Internet ambitions have helped drive News Corp.'s stock up 18% this year.
While Xdrive ended up in bankruptcy (a casualty of the dot-com boom), the pair's second venture, an Internet marketing firm called Response Base, took off: Within a year they sold it to an outfit called eUniverse for several million dollars and joined the company. Around this time, in late 2002, Tom decided that social networking should be their next big bet. "I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster," he says, "and I thought, 'They're thinking way too small.' "
But MySpace just kept signing people up. At the same time, rival Friendster, which was once the hottest social-networking site, was stumbling badly, giving Anderson and DeWolfe a lucky break and a roadmap for what not to do. "We grew so fast and could never keep up," admits Friendster president Kent Lindstrom. "Our page-load times were 20 to 30 seconds when MySpace's were two or three seconds." Secondly, Friendster management sanitized its site - much to Anderson's delight. "They had no room for fakesters," Anderson says. "If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us? People said, 'I'm going to go to MySpace because I can do what I want there.' "
The upside, of course, is the sugar-daddy factor: that deep-pocketed parent to back your best ideas. Of the 20 new products in development, DeWolfe is particularly excited about VoIP, the 11 new international sites, and MySpace News. Several e-commerce deals - including a likely partnership with eBay or Amazon - are in the works, as is a MySpace Sports site and MySpace Fashion. DeWolfe and executives at Fox Interactive Media, which oversees more than 20 News Corp. Internet businesses, are also upgrading MySpace's photo- and video-storage capabilities to compete with the likes of YouTube and Yahoo's Flickr. "Chris and Tom are adamant about trying to wage war on a feature basis rather than by blocking access (to other sites)," says Michael Barrett, FIM's chief revenue officer, who joined News Corp. from AOL in June.
What, exactly, is MySpace turning into? DeWolfe says he sees it as a "lifestyle brand." But a brand has to stand for something. And with all the growth and evolution of the site, it's hard to fathom what that lifestyle even is. No question, the MySpace user base is changing. Some 87% of users today are 18 or older; 52% are 35 or older, according to comScore. Might MySpace become too big and broad and successful to be cool? One MySpace observer, Martin Sorrell, who heads ad giant WPP, believes it could: "MySpace could be like a fashion brand. The more successful you get, the more common you become." DeWolfe disagrees: "We're not deciding what's cool. Our users are," he says. "MySpace is all about letting people be what they want to be."
