MySpace Still Reaches 50M People Each Month

http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/01/14/myspace-still-reaches-50-million-people-each-month/

by gwintrob • 12 years ago

85 54 12 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

If anyone from their engineering team wants to share details, there's an open Quora question about engineering at MySpace: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-an-engineer-at-My...

striking• 12 years ago

This is written like an advertisement. Not trying to knock them, just thought it was worth mentioning that News Corp owns both WSJ and MySpace. Smells like a (mildly informative) advert.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

Definitely a bit iffy to publish a "did you know this service we own still exists and is hot, hot HOT?"

I also feel like the 50M reach is probably disingenuously presented.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

Apparently News Corp no longer owns MySpace. From near the top of the article:

"It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media."

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

unless they have a 0% stake, your point is moot.

anomalous• 12 years ago

I'm pretty certain the article goes on to say that it was sold from News Corp 3 years ago to another advertising company. So News Corp hasn't owned it for a while.

TheSoftwareGuy• 12 years ago

sometimes I like to imagine what I think would have lead reporters/journalists to investigate what they do. For this one I imagine the reporter was like walking around the offices trying not to make it look like she's worried about the deadline she she needs to have another article in before. At some point she realizes the parent company also owns myspace, does some small amount of research and just writes this in one night and turns it in. Kinda like what a lot of people do with their essays in school.

swatow• 12 years ago

For some context, that is 1/27 of Facebook's monthly users, or 1/10 of Google Plus'.

EDIT: was "1/270 of Facebook's monthly users", now corrected.

kolistivra• 12 years ago

s/270/27/

wodenokoto2• 12 years ago

MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November.

So that is actually a hell of a lot better than the headline leads you to believe. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population that - according to the article - checked in on Myspace last November.

Yes, I also find that hard to believe.

skrebbel2• 12 years ago

EDIT: I stand corrected, the comment below is bollocks. Honest apologies.

That's about 1/6th of the entire US population

It baffles me every time when Americans think that the world stops at their borders.

What makes you think all these people are Americans? We're talking a 120th of the world's population, what do you find hard to believe?

LeoPanthera• 12 years ago

"the social networking site that put the very concept of social networking on the map"

Friendster?

jabrams• 12 years ago

8-)

dear• 12 years ago

No. ICQ.

vidarh• 12 years ago

For me it was sixdegrees.com (1997)

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

FriendsReunited?

psykovsky• 12 years ago

No, it was Hi5! =)

4ad• 12 years ago

No, it was BBSs and IRC. And that's probably not right either, I just don't know what was before that. I think "social networking" is an emergent phenomenon once you have some trivial, really trivial technology, and groups of people of some critical mass.

jmarbach• 12 years ago

Compete reports data that is very inconsistent with the numbers in the article:

https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ

About a YOY 50% decline rather than a 575% increase in November '14.

potatolicious• 12 years ago

Third party "analytics" services are highly suspect. They often (usually?) aren't even within the ballpark, either in trend or quantity analysis.

http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp...

Why these services still exist is beyond me. At best they are worthless, at worst they are fraudulent.

ericd• 12 years ago

+1, Compete et al are not only usually an order of magnitude off for our sites, they're not even directionally accurate.

adventured2• 12 years ago

I never cease to be amazed at how old web brands can straggle on.

Excite.com is still an approximately top 3,000 US site. As is MyWay.com, which is owned by the same parent as Excite, and looks like it hasn't seen a design update in a decade plus.

Lycos still gets a modest amount of traffic.

And Digg is still a roughly top 500 site in the US. I put them in the same zombie-former-big-web-brand category as those other sites.

simi_• 12 years ago

The new Digg is* awesome, and doesn't share any ties with the old Digg. It was bought for a modest amount by this pretty cool company: http://betaworks.com/

* or used to be? I haven't checked it in ~1 year

adventured2• 12 years ago

I'm familiar with the story, I just don't regard what they're doing as much more than temporarily riding on the glory of the former site, much as MySpace is doing today.

Is it a great product? An innovative product? I don't think so, every time I visit digg it comes across as just another aggregator, and there isn't much special about that.

benbristow• 12 years ago

Mindspark, part of IAC, own Excite and MyWay.

Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store.

If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.

neura• 12 years ago

Lots of impressive numbers being thrown around. Seems like they're offering up some stats to get some hype before another sale?

allendoerfer2• 12 years ago

Sometimes I imagine it to be fun to lead a company like MySpace or Yahoo. Something, which was once enormous and is still quite big but declining.

Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …

I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.

You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.

j452• 12 years ago

It's like owning your 10th or 15th laptop when many are on their 3rd to 6th.

The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one.

Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity.

Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.

allendoerfer2• 12 years ago

Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.

If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.

kmfrk2• 12 years ago

I imagine they would leave it alone as much as possible, because they aren't sure what's bringing in all the traffic. Wouldn't want to be another Digg.

pan69• 12 years ago

Its funny how similar the Digg and Myspace home pages look..

andreasklinger• 12 years ago

Most likely a lot of that traffic is just SEO traffic that bounces away when they don't find what they look for.

50M sounds like a vanity number of unique visitors.

Still a lot but not comparable (thus actionable or risky-to-destroy) to eg "50M active users"

(to be fair twitter/fb and co usually also communicate the unique visitors afair)

nebula• 12 years ago

What's Digg's story. Curious to know.

franze• 12 years ago

i actually do this kind of thing regularly: consulting big, mighty companies with huge websites (huge from a technical, content and traffic point of view) that are having a hard time or are falling behind.

and yes, it's awesome. but god damn, it's hard - and at first very unthankful - work.

why? things are the way they are because they got the way they are.

i.e.: you wan't to do something something very sane, let's say you want that a link from the startpage links directly to another page instead of getting dragged over 16 (a real world example) redirects. oh yeah, and you have the full support by the CEO to do whatever is necessary.

now there are two possible scenarios:

a) the person / team who is responsible for the mess is still with the company. he/she will justify - with good, valid arguments - that each of these 16 redirects is necessary. this person has spent 10+ years to work with the company and was doing the best work he/she was able - under the circumstances (which were never easy) - to do. the reasoning of this person is flawless. he/she - the person which "owns" this technical part - will refuse to do it. threatens to leave the company if you do it - oh - and the CEO says that this person is "indispensable".

b) the person / team who was responsible for the mess is no longer with the company. nobody has a clue, nobody knows why it's in there and nobody knows what will happen. if you do it anyway a huge shitstorm will start where everybody is complaining about the "incompetent" consultant.

the easiest option is always not to do anything (also called "lets do something else"), but well - that's the losers way.

so what to do

I) always start with hard cold data (i.e.: perf stats, specs of how many redirect the different browsers follow, ..), because this is the best way to ->

II) get rid of personalities - technical owners are great during product development, are liability and burden during maintenance and restructuring.

III) make sure that everybody understands that things will get worse before they get better

IV) focus on execution (a.k.a. do it anway, no matter what)

V) be aware that - newly introduced - bugs that do not kill the company will not get fixed right away

VI) be aware that there will be major criticism - and a lot of pressure on the CEO

and well, this is only the process for the absolutely sane changes you want to introduce. lets imagine the process for stuff where there would be an actual need for discussion.

it's an awesome job, it's a horrible job, it called consulting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBJMq-isHU4#t=23

update: step LXVIII) take the blame, all of it, but never the praise

SergeyDruid• 12 years ago

Couldn't those companies invest their money in a total new and fresh service/brand? We can agree that they're in fact declining, isn't it like "pulling up a car off a cliff"?

psaintla• 12 years ago

My first web dev job was at a company in that situation. Trust me when I say that would never happen. By the time a company reaches the position myspace is in they usually have a penny pinching CEO that sees engineering as an expense. The entire codebase is usually put in maintenance mode until there is a drop in ad revenue. That's when the board and CEO create a panic project to refresh the site or introduce a new gimmick to fight the decline. That usually happens once a year or so.

Little thought is given to efficiency or refactoring because the decision makers don't care about that. Everything eventually becomes about quick quarterly "wins" so that executive management can earn their bonuses. In practice this means if you can't plan, complete and show the project directly increased revenue or decreased expenses for that quarter it won't become a priority.

That is the wonderful shortsighted world of a one product company in decline :-)

yuhong• 12 years ago

I wonder why that kind of CEO tends to be chosen in the first place.

zaqokm• 12 years ago

Great customer acquisition cost, less than $1 per user. With ROI at 10 to 20 times, that was a pretty good investment for $35M.

elberto34• 12 years ago

i'm sure most of those visits are from random search results, not users genuinely interested in the site

artumi-richard• 12 years ago

My first reaction to this was "MySpace? - some kind of stargazing based website?" before moments later: "Wow! - I completely forgot what Myspace was!"

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

In short, it is due to all of the hard links still present from all of the Instagram #throwbackThursday posts

OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.

jsilence• 12 years ago

I don't get it why the former big social sites don't invest in viable protocols which would allow their userbase to connect to other former walled gardens.

Their users stick to the platform no matter what. Why not give them some incentives and more flexibility?

Why don't they implement oauth, zot and tent et.al.?

azurelogic• 12 years ago

Yes, 49.9M people each month visit MySpace after discussing old, washed up websites with their friends and saying, "Does MySpace even exist today?"

The other 100K are juggalos and pedophiles.

oreilco• 12 years ago

WSJ shamelessly pushing another Murdoch property...

ChrisArchitect• 12 years ago

sort of unreal to have a 50M number kicking around. Who are these people? If it isn't just spam/misguided links... Seems like a user would have to have serious investment in content or community there to stick around. Perhaps some strong communities hanging on. Still seems pretty crazy since the relaunch/revamp wiped mostly everything out..... defo another one of those straggler online entities hanging on ...I always like to wonder about this 'other internet' people seem to surf that would include dead properties like this...

MySpace Still Reaches 50M People Each Month

Related Stories