How to Save MySpace
I wouldn’t bet against MySpace. They attract over 70 million people a month (just in the US), and by most accounts are still one of the 10 most popular sites in the world. They also have a new management team, that’s headed up in part by Michael Jones (COO), the most all around talented internet executive I know.
But they’re clearly headed in the wrong direction, and have been for the last two years. Having grown up in LA, and having started Docstoc down here, there’s a bit of a shared connection. I know many of their founders and early employees, and one of the co-founders of Intermix (the parent company of MySpace) is an investor. MySpace has lost the battle as the “place for friends”. If the powers that be can accept this and move forward with breakneck speed, they will have an incredibly huge opportunity to build something we will all be talking about again.
The following are my 7 Ways on How to Save MySpace
1.) MySpace = Yahoo 2.0: Turn MySpace into the Next-Generation Portal
MySpace should not require a login to get into the site, and I DON’T want to see my profile when I do log in. It should be the next generation content/ entertainment portal that leverages millions of user profiles to more accurately provide data to advertisers on what is appealing to specific demographics.
• Management will have to be willing to forgo millions in revenue in the short term by giving up the coveted advertising on the login page, to rebuild a compelling user experience
• Take away the primary focus on the logged in home page, on my profile and other users profiles – MySpace is no longer the popular online destination for connecting with friends, but it still is a traffic behemoth
• Get users immediately into valuable content that engages them in the site: featured video, music, news; video, popular trending items in my network
2.) A Micropayment Ecosystem for ALL Digital Goods
MySpace Music was an ambitious project, but it was executed moronically. They should have leveraged their relationships with the labels to recreate an ITunes that allows users to listen to songs in full and pay less than $1 a track. MySpace should also have the ability to save my credit card information and with a click of a buy button, enable every user to seamlessly purchase any digital good.
• Music – enable a dead simple player on band and profile pages that allows creators to upload their songs and have users purchase them for any price they set
• Movies – no website has more Hollywood DNA. Work with the studios to have premium Hulu-ish content prominently branded and for sale
• Artwork/Content – let users upload and share virtually any digital content including artwork and documents that they can promote and sell
3.) Local News Online & More Valuable User Generated Content
The user generated content on MySpace includes user profiles, updates, blogs and pictures. MySpace should leverage their users to create millions of topics pages indexed in search engines. This could also be done by leveraging a partnership (or buyout) of a site like Mahalo.
• Local newspapers are dying all across the country. Rupert Murdoch is quite the fan of newspapers. MySpace should create thousands of online local newspapers that can be managed by a small team of experienced virtual editors and powered by a community of millions of citizen journalists.
• MySpace should be leveraging editors and their community to create millions of topic pages that can be indexed by search engines and drive traffic. Think eHOW or About.
4.) Court Star Power
Who are the evangelists pimping MySpace? Where is their Ashton Kutcher & CNN? MySpace HAS followers, what it doesn’t have are people excited to promote themselves on their platform. If MySpace can amass millions of users following celebrities, thought leaders and evangelists, these self promotion hounds will bring everyone else back and keep them engaged.
• MySpace’s attempt to copy twitter with “Status and Mood” was lame and sophomoric in comparison to Facebook’s play.
• Make the Status updates an exclusive benefit that ONLY celebrities and famous people get, and move millions of users to follow those select groups of evangelists.
• Kill the “friends” concept. I’m not friends with most of the people that are connected to me on social networks. There are people mutually connected, people I follow, and people who follow me.
5.) Fuel Micro Jobs
The world is flat, but it’s also poor. There are millions of people all over the world and in the US who need supplemental income. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an amazing service that that enables the exchange of micro payments for any variety of activity. MySpace should be the conduit for the exchange of billions of dollars, connecting people who need work done with people who need work.
• Leverage a worldwide community to enable a perfect market for outsourcing activities like online research, writing and content review.
• MySpace’s active users on average have less discretionary income than Facebook’s active users. Empower working mothers and folks out of work across the US with the opportunity to make an additional $20 – $500 a month doing various online service based projects.
6.) New Product Releases Every Month & A Rock Star Product Evangelist
MySpace has come out with a thousand new features since I started using the site, but most seem to be buried in the navigation structure. The MySpace product management and dev team need to bite of fsmaller projects, get them out more quickly, and make sure they are exposed to everyone visiting the site.
• Have a set date every month where the public knows MySpace is coming out with a new key feature and build excitement and buzz around these releases. Their development process need to be more open and transparent to get the community excited about being part of reviving the MySpace user experience.
• In the early days of MySpace, Tom used to post messages all the time talking about new updates, fixes and features in the site, and even personal notes. MySpace needs Tom to be Tom again – the evangelist always communicating and involving the users. MySpace lost its personal touch, they need it back.
7.) Hustle & Chutzpa
I recently finished “Stealing MySpace” by Julia Angwin. The book is an incredible accounting of the history of MySpace. Anyone who reads it should be amazed at a how a group of founders and dealmakers that were perpetually underfunded built one of the best known internet sites and had the largest financial exit of its time.
They did this because they had Hustle and Chutzpa, and it’s the same DNA th at Rupert Murdoch has. But somewhere in-between it got muddled.
MySpace surpassed Friendster in large part because they were quicker to iterate, they took more risks, and they turned their mistakes into opportunities. They built a fundamentally revolutionary user experience enabling friends to connect online.
But that risk-taking mentality seems long gone. I hope that MySpace is a place I want to start visiting again every day instead of once a month out of morbid curiosity. I want Facebook to legitimately have competition, so we all benefit as consumers. Most of all I want MySpace to take their 1000 plus employees & 100 million plus users and take big risks.
MySpace is a giant, and giants don’t quietly fade into ambiguity. They should be killed in glorious battle making a mosterous roar as they fall to a more worthy opponent; or they take their place as an endangered warrior that albeit bloodied and wounded, outlasted all their counterparts and will remain immortalized for generations to come.
I’m especially drawn to point number 3. In particular, there are a slew of small newspapers that focus on very niche audiences that provide invaluable local and targeted news. I fear that when we lose these small newspapers, the information they report simply wont get reported. Ideas like you mention in point number 3 will help ensure that type of news gets disseminated. The next step will be aggregating that information and providing some analysis to along with the raw information.
Great post, Jason. I am routing for MySpace, too. Not only because I respect a lot of their current senior executive team but also for the LA tech scene. I think when a company that has achieved this scale has been passed by more nimble competitors who are out-innovating them I think that the best solution will be to find focus. Stop trying to compete with Facebook & Twitter and find the areas where MySpace can build their new brand around. I’m now sure that Yahoo 2.0 is it – but I agree with your idea of ditching logins. Anyway, thanks for the post, putting thought into this and starting the dialog.
Like Jason, I have nothing but faith in Mike Jones. He is absolutely one of the best internet executives out there. I’m sure that the ideas outlined above, and those beyond the scope of this post, will be carefully analyzed by Mike and team on their road back to making MySpace successful again.
Nice ideas Jason. Perhaps also a good jumping off point for improvement and survival would be to FIX the site so that it works well consistently, and to establish a better technical support experience. The current method of paying minimum wage handlers to quickly fire through and respond to as many tech support requests as possible per hour via canned responses is not true support. Even with that method, they still take over a week to respond to a basic request, and the response is typically useless and generic. This is based on my own research, from submitting requests to phone interviewing “customer service” workers at MySpace who posted their resume in order to get a detailed account of their daily activities and metrics.
Hopefully they are able to overcome the current challenges!
Regards,
Evan
So think investing in the user experience to recapture loyalty by spending time on fixing what they have, hiring more people to process support at a higher technical level, all while planning and developing ideas such as yours that they can implement to the people who have held out hope that MySpace would fix the existing issues and become a more relevant tool. Not sure if that is possible with a 30% RIF.
Great post, Jason. I’d concur with Mark, too. I’m a huge fan of MySpace, and have been since 2005, but haven’t had the desire to use their site in a long time. I know their executives have the ability to execute, but it they have to be willing to take some big risks. I’m rooting for them!
Nice job, Jason. The wheels are turning and clearly you have put some thought into this. Simple and eloquently put.
Nicely done Jason. You should know MySpace has been trying to become a social portal or hub for a while now. Let’s see if the new c-class as I like to call them can do it. I think that with their leadership and innovative thinking anything is possible.
Given all that input, your investors are no doubt already worrying that you, too, are going to be recruited away from Docstoc to join the new turn-around team at MySpace! With all the MySpace DNA now sprinkled around the LA tech scene, it truly would be a shame for the company to slowly sail forever into the sunset. Good for you for taking initiative to stimulate new ideas and thinking for their future!
These are all great. A few more I would add to the list;
1. Retool the site to allow a great focus on blogs. At one point in the past I heard that 50% of all the worlds blogs were MySpace blogs. As a non-MySpace user, I find their blogs incredibly hard to look at, find or navigate.
2. Focus on Music. Not only is this their history, but its also the 1 big advantage they still hold. One idea is to incorporate features that we get from Pandora, iLike, etc.
3. Jason Calacanis suggested some interesting idea’s in an April 22nd blog post: Become an email provider and a search engine. Interesting ideas.
finally….do whatever Mike Jones says, he knows his shit!
Great post. I agree with you on #3. Local news has been dying a fast death, both in print and TV. People are still interested in local news, probably more so than National news, but with news staff cuts the quality of local journalism is disappearing. Rupert is still big on the newspaper business and he has the ultimate vehicle in MySpace to filter out all of that local news to users. Look at how well the NPR model has been doing. Their audience is growing like crazy.
Good post Jason. I think #1 is a sure shot winner. Myspace shoudl try and become an entertainment portal – games, videos etc. That coupled with the micro payments can be a healthy revenue model and a lot more dependable than an advertisement based revenue stream.
Jason, This is an excellent post and great comments as well. I don’t know the answer myself (more powerful blogging and micro-transactions sound like a good start), although I would guess the group of talented execs would not have left their previous projects to join the team if they didn’t have a compelling turnaround plan in mind. I am looking forward to seeing them execute their strategy and I join everyone here in wishing them good luck!
The emphasis has to be on content–albeit, GOOD content. Curated user generated content and premium content will create real value for MySpace. Also, I would charge $5 per year to access the site (I would pay this much to use Facebook or Twitter). By charging this nominal fee, it weeds out the fake profiles and eliminates wasted bandwidth and keeps the site free from lame “Shoot the Rapper” ads, which makes the user experience far better.
Jason,
Totally agree that MySpace should use its media connections and massive audience to aggregate a broad set of content, make it easy to navigate (including using collaborative filtering to do recommendations), and negotiate rights to allow its users (today primarily a very young demographic) to mash up that premium content with easy to use editing tools.
At the same time, I actually believe that MySpace has another opportunity. Today Facebook is your place for “friends”, “acquaintances”, and “business contacts” (shared with LinkedIn on the business contacts front). MySpace has a capability to be YourPublicSpace, a place where you maintain your PUBLIC facing digital self.
- Your Web Site (multiple customizable pages with easy to use builder interface such as Weebly )
- Your Blog (an implementation of WordPress that takes advantage of the WordPress Theme ecosystem)
- Your Live Video Feed and Chat Room (along the lines of UStream)
- Your Photos (Publicly facing, with a plugin that let’s you easily move photos from any website (specifically Facebook) into your MySpace public photos.
- Your Videos (Publicly facing, with a plugin that let’s you move your videos from YouTube, or any other service into MySpace video (no one should care where the video is hosted with embedding being prevalent)
- Your Dating Profile (Today MySpace is perhaps the largest dating site in the world, although they try to gloss that over promoting it as a music/content service. Embrace dating, build a rockin’ dating profile/search, and dip into Match’s business)
- Your Resume/Bio (a copy of what you have posted on LinkedIN)
- Your Newsfeeds (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) (an aggregation of all the feeds that a user may have across different services.)
Basically MySpace should be a consolidation of all things YOU, PUBLICLY FACING. I would even let people register domain names, and point them to MySpace.com/yourname, yet another revenue source.
They should also consider offering a premium subscription (for publishers) that takes ads of the site and creates a pristine user experience.
The interfaces need to be COMPLETELY re-done (keep the back end services and rebuild the middle/front end), and make sure that there is a RICH and WELL DOCUMENTED/SUPPORTED API that lets third party developers extend the product (including a human function within the company that evangelizes/recruits developers).
It is widely rumored that there is a BIG “NOT BUILT HERE” syndrome within the company, and THAT is the # 1 problem that needs to be addressed. For companies of that size to change (especially with so many active users and developers focused on ongoing maintenance), they need LOTS of entrepreneurial fresh blood. The exec team is TOP NOTCH (Jason, Mike, Owen, and Jon Miller), and this move to reduce workforce is clearly the first step to getting the company leaner so that it can be MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH more nimble.
They have a LOT of product/engineering work to do, and I personally question whether the same product/engineering team that has built the MySpace of today can build the MySpace of tomorrow, in short order.
Dmitry
Love your ideas, mind if I steal them?
i skimmed the other comments, so apologize for any repetition, but i totally disagree with dmitry. people don’t want more public exposure, they want less…if they wanted more they wouldn’t all have set their myspace profiles to private and they wouldn’t have flocked to facebook. I also disagree, sorry jason, that myspace should try to be yahoo 2.0. yahoo has become (it started out with a clear vision however), unfortunately, a horse built by committee…aka…a camel.
to address the topic of the post, i think you have to start with why myspace is faltering. i also know many of the original folks there and any internet entrepreneur would be exceptionally fortunate to have a hit as bit as myspace. that said, people left myspace for facebook because of some very simple things.
1. myspace was slow for years. now it just kind of slow.
2. not only was myspace slow for years, 1 out of 10 pages generated an error screen. this wasn’t a temporary problem, it was a chronic problem that went unsolved for a long time.
3. glitz gets old. facebook is far more functional than glamorous.
4. myspace became a free dating site. notice that all women have their profiles now set to private (something facebook had by default from the start).
5. myspace gave people too much latititude to design their pages and not enough help to design them correctly. everyone thinks they are creative until they see what their creativity looks like on the web….and it usually doesn’t look good (file this under the new millenium’s version of the “creative answering machine message”).
so, what to do to fix it?
other than the obvious technical issues that need to be solved, i’d just execute on the vision that made myspace popular: a very flexible tool that allows you to express yourself on the web. they got a lot of the way there, but its klunky to use. make it simple and flexible and i think you’ll have a self publishing platform that people will come back to. this is different than facebook which is very structured and different than twitter which is very abbreviated.
Love the post – i think you nailed it
Jason-
Well thought and some great concepts, my friend. The micropayment especially is, unbelievably, still a void that hasn’t been executed and filled, and you think there are only a handful of players with the audience and loyalty to pull it off. From a social impact standpoint I also love the microjobs concept.
PS- I’ve always wondered there isn’t a Bill Simmons (the ESPN columnist who covers the NBA so thoroughly and creatively that he would arguably be a great GM) for the business world. Maybe you have a second calling as a “prescriptive journalist?”
nothing can save myspace – it’s just full of junk
Great post
1. portal ? Yahoo is an excellent destination, because people were already going there to check there email in the first place. How do you convince people to come back to myspace in the first place to check out the portal features ? This can easily become a copy cat feature, like status updates, local.. etc.
2. excellent idea. Music is a mess. This could of been huge, but other sites implement this much better. My opinion is to become a middle man for all digital services, open up api’s for people to build creative music services. Myspace needs traction, not only for their brand but other developer api’s.
3. stats say something like 90% of content is generated by 10% of users on most sites. what is the motivation to get people to contribute to myspace when most people go to myspace to consume content.
4-7. pass on star power, innovation and cool features should be what brings myspace back. Yes iterate fast.. and fire anyone that comes and says “we should have features like xyz site”, because this is what got myspace in trouble in the first place.
@Jason Droege “…people don’t want more public exposure, they want less…if they wanted more they wouldn’t all have set their myspace profiles to private and they wouldn’t have flocked to facebook….”
If that is the case, then why are there 267 million people per month visiting Blogger blogs (overwhelming majority of them public)? Oh, and another 143 million visiting WordPress blogs
http://bit.ly/gM6gj
If that is the case, why are the overwhelming majority of Twitter feeds public?
Facebook itself is trying to get their users to make more information public http://bit.ly/hc2zq, but I believe that will be hard to do, because most users don’t understand or want to deal with configuring rights.
Users clearly want their PRIVATE places (Facebook is it.) BUT, I believe that users ALSO want their own PUBLIC place, they just need a simple, elegant, scalable, open infrastructure to make it happen.
Just my $0.02
Dmitry
Great post. I’ve never understood the lack of news. Especially with the great content MySpace could access from its own parent.
dude- what about a prediction into the future post? like myspace makes a comeback, merges with facebook and they rebrand it ‘myface’ haha!
MySpace can do everything right and still die because there’s a finite amount of time that people can spend on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. MySpace’s decline has always been inversely proportional to the growth of Twitter and Facebook.
The average person simply won’t spend time on all 3 of these sites. Once they and all their friends move over to another site, why would they go back? One site has to suffer, unless it truly makes itself a purple cow and offers something unique, which MySpace won’t do.
You can say the same thing about the Scribd, Docstoc, Issu etc. war. No one will EVER use 3 of these at the same time. The one that wins will either enter into an extremely effective strategic partnership or act like a purple cow and really differentiate itself.
It seems to me that Scribd and Docstoc are competing without a doubt, but Scribd is in the lead. It’s time for Docstoc to make itself a purple cow in a big way, or the gap will just get wider.
To expand on your idea:
“• Movies – no website has more Hollywood DNA. Work with the studios to have premium Hulu-ish content prominently branded and for sale.”
You know what they should do is pull a Google and pay Seth MacFarlane to create exclusive content for them. Have him make a 20 minute exclusive Family Guy episode for myspace, and make sure the only way you can watch it is if you’re logged into MySpace.
People who haven’t logged into myspace for months will come back just to watch this (before someone puts it on youtube). Then they can leverage people toward instant $2 downloads of it or DVD sales etc. They could make the episode a cliffhanger and say, “If you want to watch Part 2, pay $1 for an instant download.”
This exclusive content would also give them an opportunity to sell ads at a higher rate, as a piece of content like this would attract premium advertising.
Presumably, since everything is under the FOX umbrella, they could do with MacFarlane what Youtube couldn’t do (or wasn’t willing to pay for). Pay him to make a Family Guy sketch.
Also, about your partnership with Mahalo.
“This could also be done by leveraging a partnership (or buyout) of a site like Mahalo.”
Can they really afford to buy Mahalo? I assume Mahalo, since it got 21 mil. in VC company, can’t be bought for less than $60 something million at the very low end. Aren’t liquidation preferences in these arrangements usually 3-5 times what investors give. But a partnership with Mahalo would make everyone happy. I think the Mahalo Answers product is the strongest and has the highest upside since Y! Answers is so terrible.
And Myspace users are the demographic who use sites like Y! Answers, so moving them toward a service like Mahalo Answers would please them.
Docstoc advice
This is going back many months, but I recall Docstoc ran a contest where they gave money or some prize to the person who uploaded the most content during a given month. This idea was great, but I remember thinking that it lacked a viral element, and actually gave people a de-incentive to tell their friends about it. The more people they told about it, the less chance they had to win because they’d be dealing with more competition.
It’s great that you got all that extra content added with this contest, but it should have been tweaked by employing the classic buddy system. Refer your friend to this contest on Docstoc, and if they win, then you win too. That way the contest would have spread logarithmically.
How did this comment turn into a blog post? I have other ideas for docstoc, but I’ll write about them later.
Jason Droege “…people don’t want more public exposure, they want less…if they wanted more they wouldn’t all have set their myspace profiles to private and they wouldn’t have flocked to facebook….”
If that is the case, then why are there 267 million people per month visiting Blogger blogs (overwhelming majority of them public)? Oh, and another 143 million visiting WordPress blogs
http://bit.ly/gM6gj
If that is the case, why are the overwhelming majority of Twitter feeds public?
Facebook itself is trying to get their users to make more information public http://bit.ly/hc2zq, but I believe that will be hard to do, because most users don’t understand or want to deal with configuring rights.
Users clearly want their PRIVATE places (Facebook is it.) BUT, I believe that users ALSO want their own PUBLIC place, they just need a simple, elegant, scalable, open infrastructure to make it happen.
Dmitry
I totally buy this progressive view. Myspace should, by rights, be a lot cooler than the regimented UI of facebook, twitter etc. Look at it’s angle in the coolest industry of them all – everyone secretly wants to be a rock star/rapstar/popstar. It’s biggest issue is that the world thinks it’s too complicated to get the most out of it. That’s too much effort and there’s too many other easy things to do.
The celebrity profiles should be rife here, but generally, your average celeb is just too damn stupid and too damn lazy to spend the time in working myspace. And they’re right to have that view.
Maybe that means those who are willing to cut through the myspace interface are those who just want/need it a bit more – your early Kate Nash’s and Lily Allen’s and that’s cool, but when underground & undiscovered goes mainstream, well, it just get’s a bit desperate. And desperation isn’t attractive, which is kinda apt as that’s what Myspace feels like at the moment.
So; heed this wise man’s advise – bring back cool, make it easier to use, give people the opportunity to supplement income, take a few knocks on the chin and come out of it a strong, lean and hungry fighter.
Steve
Hmm, the iLike deal seems to suggest that Myspace has been heeding your advice. Here’s a post I did elaborating…
http://chaosoutoforder.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/ilike-deal-signals-myspaces-new-direction/
Hey, I came in from Yahoo. Bookmarked, cheers.
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It seems to me, since Facebook overtook Myspace it’s kind of taken a back seat even more than it should have. People discredit it as ‘dead’ but it still has a massive active userbase.
I guess Facebook is the new shiny toy and Myspace is headed for the shelf.
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NO!!! You know nothing about the myspace era! Really, you had to be a part of it to understand. I joined in 2005. Everyone just wants Myspace to go back to how it was circa 2006! People liked the HTML profile customization, bulletins, taking pictures (myspace pictures are one of a kind), top 8 friends, etc… Basically, everything from ‘classic’ myspace. Oh, those were the days… *sigh*. Trust me, most of the people from that generation miss the old myspace and don’t really like Facebook. We just go on facebook because there really isn’t anywhere better to go.