President from MySpace shares his vision
By Simon T Small at April 19, 2010 | 9:56 amPrint
On the first Wednesday of this month, Tim Burrowes of Mumbrella chaired the MySpace hosted event featuring Michael Jones (Co-President, MySpace) to discuss ‘The Future of Social Media’ – yes everyone thought that was ironic – but I went away with a more positive perception of this social-music-media-platform-thing.
I went to this event with a dull memory of using MySpace and full of wonder as to what this dying giant had to say about the future. I wasn’t alone. Most people I asked, kinda laughed and said “Yea, I used to use it, but I couldn’t imagine going there again, and we don’t buy media with them…”
Although I’m not totally in love with MySpace now, there are definitely some important messages that their Co-President had to get out, and they were well crafted and simple.
- 200,000 new users/month globally
- In top 10 websites in the world
- Serves 1 B impressions/month in Australia
- Reaches 2 M people/month in Australia
- See’s itself as a content discovery engine – helping you find music
- Facebook is more like an email engine
- MySpace & Facebook are in no way competition
- Is implementing features that work from Facebook
- They acknowledge the site needs major improvement
- Mike Jones is a well grounded and balanced dude, very approachable
- The underlying message – We’re big and not going anywhere
My main take away – keep an eye on them (login every now and then), consider MySpace if you’re targeting youth audiences or want to align with music – they reach 2M users a month, not the monolith that is Facebook, but no laughing matter either.