Chris DeWolfe, left, and Tom Anderson of MySpace.com Photo: New York Times
The New York Times has done a big piece on MySpace: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher.
More than 70 million members have signed up -- more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it -- drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.
MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.
The problem is that really, nobody has enough ads to put on a billion pages a day.....
But the key paragraph is almost at the end:
IN some ways, MySpace has assumed the role America Online held a decade ago when it introduced e-mail services and Internet chat to the masses. But AOL's example is a cautionary one. For many reasons, largely its failure to keep up with trends, AOL lost its place in the social lives of young people.
And the key paragraph that's missing is the one about Microsoft's MSN Spaces, which seems to be more popular than MySpace in Asia (it supports Chinese and Korean) and, I'd guess, already has more than 30 million users.
