I won’t comment on MySpace vs. Facebook’s rivalry theme du jour… but I think the 2007 love/hate affair with Facebook and MySpace shows just how much things change online, and how quickly they change in such a short span.
Last year, in September, Facebook opened up to non-students and the site skyrocketed in popularity. That move led many to call for MySpace’s demise.
Late last year, in December, MySpace surpassed Yahoo! as the world’s largest site by pageviews. People were shocked and in awe. Could both Facebook and MySpace continue to grow? I guess so.
Earlier this year, Facebook launched the developers program, spawning a bunch of useless applications. Facebook fanboys proliferated the joint, once again calling for MySpace to die at any given second.
MySpace promised to do the same, as did LinkedIn, but ultimately, cooler heads prevailed, asking: does it really matter?
Facebook parlayed all of that to secure a $240M investment from MSFT for 1.6% stake, implying a $15B paper value.
To justify the lofty price, Facebook launched Social Ads, essentially telling its users to go f*** off.
MoveOn.org, who failed to get the US out of Iraq (basically), then somehow shifted gears (like, totally) and targeted Facebook’s ad strategy…
Today News Corp. confirmed that they will be launching an ad network, which we said just last week was brilliant.
All in all, just a regular 12 months online, no?
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November 26th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Excellent summation. A few months ago during the height of the whole Facebook ‘apps’ hype (my how our definition of an app has fallen) I felt like the only sober person at the party.
I’m still trying to figure out where the money is. Potential privacy backlashes notwithstanding, Social Ads (and any other form of behavioral targeting) just isn’t going to scale like Google’s model did. And Microsoft’s investment is overblown since a few hundred million is literally chump change for them. They’re one of the few companies who could’ve bought Facebook outright (in the current wildly speculative market anyway) but didn’t. They just wanted the cheapest buy-in possible to counter Google. Better to invest than buy in the current market.