MySpace Taking Over Pop Culture

by Katharina Scholtz

An interesting article in The New York Times discusses the evolution of MySpace from a niche social networking site to a mainstream content host. Entitled "From MySpace to YourSpace", the article points out that MySpace is currently like a portal, but is evolving into much more. Tough to disagree with, especially given that My Space is in the process of launching a number of features; it has its own record label, news site, is a place for amateur film-makers to show their work and has recently launched a content guide called MySpace Celebrity.

This makes me think about the discussion back in 2005 that Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace to be competition for MTV. MySpace’s evolution means that it has an edge on a channel like MTV, especially if it offers all the content with the added bonus of the user interaction you can only get from a social networking site.

The fact that the sites are geographically customisable to their local users gives MySpace a further advantage. While MTV does have MTV Base and MTV Europe, they’d find it tough to present specialized local content for as many countries as MySpace plans to reach.

I’d be interested to know how we could measure their relative success over the last three years (I’ve struggled to find viewership statistics for MTV). I do think that MTV’s revamp of their site into a video- based platform suggests that they see a need to make themselves more online friendly.

Given MySpace’s launches in an increasing number of countries, and the fact that their 110 million monthly users are active users, I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that MySpace is proving to be competition for MTV. By potentially becoming the go-to source for pop-culture - if they can manage to maintain user interaction and control, and balance their advertisers’ needs with those of their users - MySpace will grow into a powerful cultural, commercial and advertising force. MTV no doubt has its own plans, and I’m curious to watch as they get carried out.

What we can definitely learn from this discussion is that we can’t rely on only seeing Facebook and MySpace as each other's competition. As I discussed in my post on RSS TV, this kind of convergence means that all media channels and platforms could eventually be competition for each other. Understanding where their respective strengths lie and how their brands can be effectively translated across mediums will determine who stays strong and who becomes obsolete.

2008/01/22 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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MySpace Taking Over Pop Culture

by Katharina Scholtz

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