
MySpace Still Reaches 50M People Each Month - gwintrob
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/01/14/myspace-still-reaches-50-million-people-each-month/
======
allendoerfer
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.

~~~
kmfrk
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.

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

~~~
mercnet
They released a new version and members hated it They had no way of rolling
back to the older version. [http://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-
successfully-kill...](http://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-
kill-a-community-50450)

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adventured
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_
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/](http://betaworks.com/)

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

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
prawn
I didn't really visit the old Digg but I visit the new Digg daily and I know
of a few others in the same position. Might not be your thing, but it's clean
and regular/predictable so I can see how it would attract a new audience.

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eastbayjake
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...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-
an-engineer-at-MySpace)

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

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swatow
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.

~~~
wodenokoto
> 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.

~~~
skrebbel
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?

~~~
jrpt
It's because the article literally says it's 50.6 million uniques in the US:
"Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users
in the U.S. in November. That’s a massive surge of 575% versus the same month
in 2013."

I read this as implying their uniques (as measured by, say, Google Analytics)
were 50.6 million in the US, which probably means less than 50.6 million
Americans visited the site in Nov. For instance, if every one of those uniques
visited on both their smart phone and their computer, then it'd actually be 25
million real people. The truth is likely somewhere between 25 and 50 million
Americans visited in Nov.

~~~
skrebbel
Ok, I'm officially a moron today. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate. I
had read the article, but apparently not well enough.

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BorisMelnik
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.

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

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jsilence
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.?

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ChrisArchitect
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...

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striking
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.

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

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oreilco
WSJ shamelessly pushing another Murdoch property...

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

Friendster?

~~~
4ad
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.

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elberto34
i'm sure most of those visits are from random search results, not users
genuinely interested in the site

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

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

[https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ](https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ)

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

~~~
potatolicious
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...](http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-
google-trends-quantcast)

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

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

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azurelogic
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.

