There’s an expression that says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, well, this begs the question, can you teach an old fox new tricks?
Business 2.0’s Owen Thomas is calling Rupert Murdoch a ”cowardly Internet lion” for not using MySpace to promote News Corp. enough. Pete Cashmore’s “MySpace News Kinda Sucks” post echoes what most people are saying: that MySpace News is no Digg killer, though it has some good features. The point is there is room for improvement.
I worked at News Corp.’s FIM from Sept. - Dec. 2006, after News Corp. bought IGN, who itself bought my company in June 2006. Frankly, I sometimes wish I had nothing to do with them because I still pay for my affiliation with all of those players, but alas, you can’t rewrite history. Also, I am not saying that to make it seem that I have any inside or confidential info, I was far away from Rupert et al.
There are a lot of storylines here worth touching on.
1. Synergies with News Corp.
I think that being able to mesh synergies in the offline space is actually easier than it is in the online space, the reason being that the offline world imposes a kind of clear, tangible boundary that one needs to operate within. Online, there are no boundaries, everything is a widget away, a module removed. This means that you can kill a good thing if you don’t handle it with care.
To some extent, I think this is one of MySpace’s problems, but this one is extremely simple in the sense that it’s an internal one. Will MySpace users be turned off if they see a lot of News Corp. promo? Perhaps, but guess what?
2. MySpace is Very Commercial As Is, So What’s the Big Deal?
A lot of the content on MySpace is promotional, so will users really care if the content is promotional and from News Corp. or from another media firm? I think not. But, of course, I am not inside the walls to make any impact.
3. The Mainstream-ization of MySpace: an Aging Demographic
MySpace’s user demographic is changing, quickly. They are getting older. So I do not think that MySpace users are as fickle as Murdoch fears.
4. The Price of Independence and Autonomy for MySpace Founders
The resistance comes perhaps from the MySpace guys Tom and Chris, who have to balance the internal pressure of boosting revenue (in exchange for operational autonomy) with MySpace’s raison d’etre.
5. Digg Factor
Word got out last year that Digg was approached by FIM, but asked for $150M. Naturally, Rupert Murdoch passed. My question is: how much of FOX’s decision to launch MySpace News is to scare Digg into selling at a lower cost? and how much of it is to really leverage MySpace one trillion users into creating a powerful social news network?
And, this came out on the day when eBay reportedly bought (did they?) StumbleUpon for $40M, valuing Digg at a fraction of the initial price they asked for.
Of course, MySpace News could be like Google Video. A giant’s attempt to enter a hot field, only to realize that it’s easier to buy than to build.
6. FOX’s “News”
I don’t even want to make this point a big deal, because some readers of this blog would know that I have an interesting history with the company, but FOX News is unique. We’ve chronicled this on our WorldMojo.com blog which covers politics, but on FOX News, Lebanese buildings do not crumble because Israel bombs them, but due to shoddy engineering; Mark Foley, the sexual allegedly homosexual child predator is not a Republican, he is a Democrat; other FOX employees would want you to think that a man is a woman and an image is akin to text… if you have no idea what the last two references are all about, too bad.
The point is, Rupert Murdoch has, wants to, and will do what he can to shape the news into his view or his intended view of the news. More power to him. That’s why we love capitalism.
But to do that, he needed MySpace because children and teenagers and young adults no longer tuned in to TV, read newspapers etc., they had their space on MySpace.
But, a few things have derailed this, one is: MySpace’s aging demo, which we noted above. If MySpace’s user demographics is getting older, it begs the question, where are the cool kids hanging today?
We’ve already seen that MySpace is Rupert’s Space, and that’s fair since he did buy the asset… but don’t one second think that this will be social news, this will be MySpace News, which means it will be FOX News, via MySpace, with links and sources that support the right wing agenda.
7. Facebook Threat
Facebook is growing by leaps and bounds. It is a very clean site. Ironically, Facebook is more Friendster than MySpace, and while MySpace took over Friendster, something tells me that Facebook is about to explode even more. It is a fad, don’t get me wrong, but so is MySpace and it has only grown. In other words, whether something is a fads or a trends is a matter of perception and conviction… and when you have Murdoch’s muscle, you can take a fad and force it into a trend.
8. Money, Money, Money…
Which boils back down to money… MySpace News is Murdoch’s latest attempt to monetize MySpace, which is generating sizable revenues for most online media companies but relatively small figures given its staggering size and reach.
MySpace will be enormous whether you like it or not. And this has been a rough week for social news sites, much the same way that 2007 has injected a dose of reality in the social news landscape: sure, social news is here to stay, much like all user generated forms of content, it does not come without downsides and advertisers have yet to really embrace it.
Mr. Murdoch, nice try, close, but no cigar.
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April 20th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
[…] The more cynical angle is this is an attempt to get MySpace users reading more news and therefore more of the content News Corp. (the parent company) produces. More on this subject at HipMojo. […]