June 19 2008

MySpace wants to be a portal!

Creator of MySpace Chris DeWolfe wants you all to think of MySpace as the next port of call for advertising after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

We were very amused this week at the news that social networking giant MySpace is aiming to become the next big web portal.” In an interview with creator Chris DeWolfe in Advertising Age DeWolfe lays out plans that put MySpace as competition for Yahoo but also includes plans for MySpace to compete with sites like Yell as a method for businesses to attract new local customers.

The site is currently undergoing a redesign that attempts to provide better exposure for brands advertising on the site as it attracts more advertisers away from the traditional portals such as MSN and Yahoo or as Chris puts it “Instead of being considered as "social media" or "social network," those people who are spending 'portal' dollars [i.e., advertising on MSN or Yahoo] are now putting MySpace into that bucket, so the buys are becoming bigger. There's more sellable inventory on those high-traffic home pages. I would equate our home page more with, say, a Yahoo, where a big, branded advertiser wants to make a big splash, or a big statement. Then MySpace.com becomes a must-buy.”

However, DeWolfe said that the News International owned site will not make the same mistakes as its rival Facebook when it launched its ad platform, Beacon, last year. He said the site will still put the user first as its some 73 million unique users were “more important than the advertiser”.

DeWolfe told adage.com that MySpace is going to be available globally on mobile devices within the next year.

If you’re an advertiser that wants to grab the youth dollar we can probably see his point, although we’re not too sure how many users ever go via the front page, as the trendy muso types we know either get there via a search on Google, or they type in myspace.com/ followed by the name of the band they’re searching for. But if you’re Marks and Spencer, or Waitrose, you probably wouldn’t touch MySpace with a bargepole, but they would go for Yahoo or MSN who have a wide cross-section of the Internet market. A quick look at the frontpage of MySpace UK today was refreshingly ad free, so they've got a long way to go.

Secondly will any small local business really be savvy enough to use MySpace? DeWolfe seems to think that the 20 million local businesses in the US have been eschewing advertising because they’ve been waiting for a MySpace solution. Will the day really come, when to quote DeWolfe a “dry cleaner will be able to go onto MySpace and buy a hypertargeted ad to target a soccer mom in their ZIP code with a 10%-off coupon?” I think not, unless of course the soccer mom in question is 15 called xtina, and lives on a trailer park, but even then it’s doubtful if they would have any clothes that were dry-clean only. Although a recent Comcast survey had the average age of MySpace users as 35 (see related items).

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)