I’d anticipated that sharing this admittedly anecdotal item over lunch with the sharp cofounders of one of the world’s most successful Internet sites would lead to an intense grilling as to why this sudden exodus occurred. (My son thinks MySpace has too many ads and the pages are ugly. He also doesn’t like the spam from alleged “friends” selling ringtones and other stuff, a problem that MySpace is trying to address.) But DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn’t ask. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for their main online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of its flexibility in design and all the media it offers.
It was an interesting window into where their hearts are. To the founders, allowing kids to claim their own niche of the Net with a MySpace page and lots of online friends was a strategic launchpad for a major media company. They are explicit that they see their competition not at Facebook but Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN. During our lunch we discussed a few of their projects: A record label. Promoting Fox network television shows. Getting users to take a more active role in politics. Mobile versions. A news service. “We’re working on 10, 15 different things,” said Anderson. But none of the ones we discussed seemed to address the problems that led my son and others to go to someone else’s space for social networking, be it Facebook or Bebo or somewhere else.
DeWolfe and Anderson are quite correct that MySpace has solid numbers. More than 66 million users visit each month. (Facebook is at 23 million.) An amazing 12 percent of all Internet minutes are spent on the site. MySpace is the most popular music destination on the Internet—even the most obscure band knows that a MySpace presence is as crucial as a sure-handed roadie. But when you compare the numbers for MySpace and Facebook, the former’s growth is leveling (less than 500,000 last month), while Facebook, which opened up to everyone, not just students, last September, is expanding faster, adding more than 2 million last month. “We’re adding 150,000 a day,” says Facebook’s Brandee Barker. And according to the comScore measuring service, in terms of minutes per visit—an area where MySpace used to trounce Facebook—“Facebook has caught up,” says comScore’s Andrew Lipsman. This is interesting because Facebook is “more of a utility,” as Barker explains it, and MySpace has much more media to burn minutes.
I left the lunch with the MySpace guys puzzled: wasn’t it the popularity of MySpace’s social networking that led to the audience that consumes all those TV promos, tunes and presidential debates? I set up a phone conversation to clarify the issue, and indeed, this time the founders spoke more about the importance of MySpace’s social-networking role. But soon the conversation turned to upcoming MySpace features like weather reports and a video service to counter YouTube. The defection of my son’s school didn’t come up again. I guess they’d forgotten about it.
