
MySpace: what went wrong – by its former VP of online marketing - century19
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify
======
aaronchall
I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It
seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I
created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned
their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would
automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near-
pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it's just MySpace, I'm not surfing for
porn!)

The article seems off base. I don't get how Facebook avoids being all over the
place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit
someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop.

Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created
MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it
easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook
from taking over social. But they didn't, and it was crap, and I basically put
up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and
that's where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed
suit.

~~~
krrrh
I totally agree with this, and when Facebook launched it was clear to me that
the restrictions it placed on customization of profile pages, and providing
smart defaults for layout, don't, and color would make social more functional
and valuable for most users.

But I still appreciate Ze Frank's defense of ugly wrt MySpace democratizing
design tools, and his observations that the fact that so many people were
cutting, modifying, and pasting css was at the time weird and kind of
wonderful.

[http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly](http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly)

> As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship,
> they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit
> out of designers. > > In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-
> made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-
> existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass
> experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Its not just ugly as some kind of aesthetic issue, it also hurt functionality.
Buttons could be moved or made invisible. Animated backgrounds would make
things hard to find, etc.

But that's not MySpace's biggest sin. Its biggest problem was all the freedom
it gave just helped turn into a defacto dating site. With no real rules and no
focus on anything, girls put up lots of cleavage photos for attention and guys
hit on them. Guys put up shirtless leering photos and girls responded.
Comments were more often bawdy talk than not. Teens and 20 somethings ruled.
It never migrated past a high school mentality. A bit like how Second Life has
now pretty much become a fetish site for furries.

Then Facebook showed up with its academic focus. The existing userbase were
all college students whose peers, professors, potential employers, family, etc
had access to their profiles, so there was a disincentive to treat it like "da
club." People put their personal and semi-professional faces up and when the
floodgates were open to Joe User, he saw the culture there, the lack of
customizations, etc and conformed to what Facebook was. It had the mainstream
professional and familial mores its roots were built upon. The Wild West of
the Myspace world was just too self-limiting in this case. It couldn't go
mainstream with its culture. It was too "young person trying to get laid"
focused.

~~~
fl0wenol
_A bit like how Second Life has now pretty much become a fetish site for
furries._

I think many of us realized that SL had little potential beyond that even in
its infancy. Minecraft soaked up the remaining interest in the potential of
the programmable, realtime virtual worlds quite nicely.

------
netcan
When FB went public at that "insane market cap," the IPO kerfuffle and all
that followed, I had a few interesting conversations. I had been working for a
while in online advertising, a lot of adwords and other ad platforms so I had
a fairly good understanding of the forthcoming advertising product that was
supposedly going to determine FB's actual value.

Anyway, my take on it was this: FB stock (at the time) is mostly a bet on two
questions. (1) Can they remain the major social network where everyone has a
profile and logs in regularly? (2) Can they build an ad platform that makes
money off that position. Most people were curious about #2, I think because FB
delayed really finding out the answer until after the IPO.

For the second question, I thought 'yes' was most likely. I had (and still
have) a lot of confidence in the power of scale to add value to an ad network.
The bigger the userbase, the more targeting opportunities you have. If you can
limit your audience to people in their 30s, with kids, within 5 miles^ and
still end up with enough people to bother I think you have a valuable ad
platform.^^ Anyway, the answer _is_ yes. FB advertising is one of the world's
blue ribbon cash cows.

That's the difference between millions and billions.

The first question though, I was (and am) less confident about. For FB to be a
good investment it needs to last decades. Google has maintained its search
position for a decade, but who knows if Facebook can in social. A lot of the
forces at work are more cultural than economic or technological and
unpredictable. Will it become uncool, unpopular. Will popular focus shift to
some new shiny thing. It's a much harder question. Maybe a reason to think
that it can is if you think FB-size and network effects locks a service into
position in ways that Myspace-size doesn't. Maybe FB's deep pockets will let
them acquire, innovate, advertise and otherwise spend their way to long term
survival. I don't really have and _educate_ way of guessing at this question.

^ _Add in "who are within 2 degrees of people that have visited your site"_
and you're really cookin.

^^tangent: if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like
penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more
in ad revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE
10 second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with
FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's.

~~~
mason55
> _if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration
> using FB login and FB ad targeting, I 'd wager you could make more in ad
> revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10
> second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with
> FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's._

It's coming. The next wave in advertising will be ad targeting based on
addressable set top boxes, which basically means targeted video ads on TV.
Advertisers will be able to do things like "make sure each household sees my
ad five times" to avoid cases where people who watch lots of TV see it twenty
times and people who don't watch much only see it once. With addressable STB's
+ microtargeting there will be a whole new set of companies for which it will
be profitable to advertise on TV. Right now the long tail of niche companies
has no chance of profitably advertising on TV because their target only makes
up a very, very, very small percentage of an individual program (think about a
company advertising Bitcoin ASIC's for example). But if they get
addressability + microtargeting right then they can make sure that only
households which are interested in Bitcoin ASIC's see the ads.

[https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/white-
pap...](https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/white-
papers/audience-iq-addressable-tv-wp.pdf)

~~~
bpyne
I dread this scenario and hope an alternative to pay more for television
programming is provided. We're down to 45 minutes a day of television right
now. Shows consist entirely of Netflix/Amazon Streaming/AppleTV. Forcing ads
on us would cause us to drop it all and go back to a movie outing every few
weeks.

Besides, ads are all over streaming television but they're in the form of
product placements within the content. They're more subtle and don't interrupt
the flow of what you are watching.

~~~
soylentcola
I think that at least in theory, the idea is akin to what Google did for
regular web advertising. Originally before targeting the only real strategy
was to blanket sites with every sort of ad imaginable and the only way to
stand out was to be more annoying and more flashy. Ad space was worth less so
site owners made less money to support their services. People looking for new
customers wasted more money because they could only target very broadly based
on the topic or general demographic of a website.

Then you got Google ads and the like. Since you could target based on
someone's general region or search topics or some other demographic info, ads
could be more relevant. They didn't need to be flashy and noisy and could sit
alongside search results or website contents as plain text or simple images.
People trying to attract customers could focus their ad budgets where they
were more likely to have a return and site owners could charge more for ad
space since it was worth more.

I think that in theory, cable and other ways of getting TV-type content could
move in much the same direction. Instead of just running more ads and hoping
that people watching show (x) will be interested, they could run ads for stuff
in your city or things in the categories you're interested in. Higher
relevance would mean less total ads for the TV company to make the same profit
selling ad space. It would mean less ads for things you'll never be interested
in. And it would mean less money wasted by companies advertising on deaf ears.

But yeah...while this could happen I'm not really that optimistic. A young
Google could take on the old model and replace it but the entrenched TV and
cable companies would likely just add it to their arsenal. Instead of fewer,
more lucrative targeted ads paying for now-free service, you'll just see the
same subscription fees and the same pile of interruptions. Just now they'll be
targeted.

~~~
bpyne
Targeted ads have some appeal. But, I'm still not sold. Here's an example of
why. My wife and I started watching Parenthood recently. There are some very
moving scenes in which a couple comes to terms with their Aspberger child's
condition. Having the scene ripped away from me to see a car ad (for example)
would be maddening.

While it's a good show the scenes are definitely written to have an ad every
10-15 minutes or so. Writers who make it in screenwriting know their bread-
and-butter comes from advertisers, so they alter natural story arcs to fit
10-15 minutes slots. It's no wonder that BBC and PBS have better stories:
their writers don't have to worry about fitting ads in.

Again, I don't mind product placement to an extent. Parenthood must have 2-3
scenes every episode with an Apple product in focus. Don't alter the flow of a
story to fit in an ad though.

------
ssharp
I may be off on the timeline a little bit, but this guy started off at MySpace
in 2009. From what I remember, Facebook had clearly "won" at that point as the
personal social network (like, where you interacted with your friends) and had
been for at least a year or two.

MySpace was largely regarded, at that point, as a cesspool, but still had the
appeal of being the place to interact with famous people and the platform
famous people used to interact with their fans.

In that sense, MySpace had already lost to Facebook in one aspect and was
about ready to lose to Twitter in the other.

~~~
gregd
The article clearly states, "By 2009, MySpace was still the biggest website in
terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according
to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company.

“I remember the first meeting they had me set up with the whole team, and it
was the saddest, most awkward meeting I’ve ever been in, in my life. And I’ve
been in some really sad meetings. Literally sat there and everyone was so
defeated,” he said.

“The analogy I use is like you were the half-time [basketball] coach, and I
walk in and it’s half-time, and you’re down by 100 points … They had been beat
down by that corporate bureaucracy, they knew they were about to lose to
Facebook. They knew that the end was near. They could smell it.”"

------
iblaine
Former MySpace engineer here. Got there when it was 1500 people and left when
it was 300. The company failed for these reasons:

* MySpace sold ads to Google when they didn't have ad inventory to sell. MySpace had to meet impression thresholds each month or pay penalties to Google. To meet those requirements, MySpace added ads where they should not have been. Impression ads were put up in odd places. MySpace forced users to log in for the sake of generating an impression. The result was a poor user experience.

* Tom & Chris were from an email spam shop background. eUniverse bought Tom & Chris email spam company. Once eUniverse had the emails, Tom & Chris had nothing to do, so they put their effort into creating something new. Friendster was doing well at the time, they decided to clone it, the result was MySpace. Spam and poor user experiences were part of their upbringing and it showed in MySpace.

* There were no coding standards. Engineering teams worked in silos with each team having their own standards. For example, at one time someone put a picture of all the different submit buttons in the break room. Tom & Chris shared this brake room. I'm not sure if the poster was motivational or insulting. We all knew the site looked ugly and this picture of all the different submit buttons quantified it.

* MySpace didn't leverage an API. FB users had the ability to add plug ins like calendars and classified ads from a myriad of sources. The result was users were able to choose the best solution. MySpace users were given the same tools built internally. Those tools were pushed out in rapid succession, without much effort, and users were left with poorly created solutions.

* MySpace cherished metrics that had no meaning. Your number of friends, for example, were meaningless. People like Percival created companies to help people add friends under the guise that having friends meant something. MySpace bought into that snake oil, Percival perpetuated it, then they hired him on as a VP.

* MySpace thought allowing users to create their own unique page was a competitive advantage. Users were given the ability to embed their own HTML within their own page. The result was ugly bloated pages. At MySpace, we had an internal message board to debate ideas. This idea was debated and people in product defended the ability to customize pages as a competitive advantage.

* Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'. Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll hear things and I'll leave it at that.

* Employees were not given stock. Given salaries were great, people did not seem to be emotionally invested in the companies success.

~~~
aaronbrethorst

        Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'.
        Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll
        hear things and I'll leave it at that.
    

I was at a tech conference in the late 00's where I heard a VP (of
Engineering?) from MySpace give a talk about the site's architecture. This was
probably 9 or 9:30 in the morning, and—I swear—he must've been totally coked
up. If that's how you, as a vice president, behave when you're up on a stage
at a conference, I wonder how you'd behave behind closed doors.

------
acheron
Here's the Guardian in 2007 worrying about how Myspace will never lose its
monopoly:

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment)

------
tootie
I don't understand this notion that "Google and Apple don't get social".
What's to get or not get? Google+ beats FB for features and usability by a
mile. Who could have possibly thought that Twitter would be a huge success? I
still don't get it! What does Instagram do that FB didn't already do? I love
all these analysts tripping over themselves to come up with a formula for a
business model that at it's core relies on dumb luck.

~~~
dredmorbius
Google have repeatedly gone to the mat to fight what its users want and
request, overridden those requests, and/or taken what people consider to be
absolutely and beyond any call _theirs_ and made clear it was Google's.

Nymwars, Real Names, spamming contacts with G+ Circles, spamming Calendar with
G+ events selected by other people, Notifications spam, forced integration of
products, an absolutely deaf ear on any privacy issues or concerns, an
insistence that "you're doing it wrong" (Circles, various settings, lord knows
what), forced YouTube integration with G+, make-work interfaces, and more.

Experiences with Glass, Streetview, WiFi snooping, Do Not Track bypassing, or
the many, many, many other killed Google products only hammer home how Google
simply fails to comprehend issues of privacy. They're not defined by
technology, they're not defined by law. They're defined by social norms, and
the boundaries people define. Boundaries Google crosses _all the fucking
time._

The conflicts between what Google _does_ , and what their former Director of
Privacy, Alma Whitten, _said_ , is staggering. Look up her old talks. I've got
a few quotes on my G+ profile ("Edward Morbius").

People's use-cases differ, but in a nutshell, I'm looking for a way to have
good an interesting conversations with people, without a tremendous breach in
my personal privacy. Google ultimately wants to sell ads, but I'm 1) not
buying those and 2) really not a choice target regardless.

There's an inherent conflict in the "social" space, and I don't really see any
way around it.

------
conradfr
I never understood the website besides listening to band songs. But at least
it was a feature that Facebook has never really done and it took some time
(for me) for Spotify, Grooveshark or Youtube to fill in.

You heard about about a band and you could listen to some songs
instantaneously without downloading it on eMule or Torrent, it was great.

~~~
Mahn
That was also the only use I ever got out of MySpace, checking out new
bands/musicians quickly to decide whether I wanted to hear more. IIRC facebook
did try a similar feature but never really catched on.

~~~
tragic
For me it was also the 'groups', which were basically a free one-click
alternative to PHPBB, albeit more primitive. For many niche interests, it was
actually livelier than reddit is today.

Persistent security holes plagued them, though, and it sort of disappeared
shortly after the News Corp buyout. Nothing I've read paints a picture of
Myspace as a classic feat of software engineering.

------
davidst
Great article but it misses an essential difference between MySpace and
Facebook. Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for
News Corporation. Zuckerberg understood the interests and tastes of his
generation. MySpace only understood the interests of their advertisers.

~~~
tdumitrescu
Is that true? I recall myspace creator "tom" being its very public face in the
early days, and it only got sold to newscorp after it was already big.

------
walterbell
Good history transcript. Has the Guardian given any other conference speeches
this quality of transcript?

~~~
rhblake
Steve Albini (the noted musician and producer) had a great talk about the
Internet and the music industry at a conference a few months ago. The Guardian
wrote a nice a recap [0] and published a full transcript (enriched with pull
quotes and some images) [1].

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-
at...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-
music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music)

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-
albinis-k...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-
keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full)

------
kevando
I was kind of hoping a Panic at the Disco song started playing when I opened
the article/

------
aninteger
Maybe related..

[http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-
insider...](http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insiders-say-
its-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft-2011-3)

------
hiphopyo
I wonder what would happen if MySpace were to suddenly revert back to the old
version.

What would they have to lose? It would make the headlines the world over, and
people would be getting back the MySpace they signed up for.

------
rwmj
I went to a marketing conference in the UK in around 2004 or 2005 where
someone from MySpace was talking about what a great opportunity it was for
marketing to their audience. At the time I was using
[http://mixi.jp](http://mixi.jp) which was way ahead in terms of usability and
reliability than MySpace (mixi later lost out to Facebook too, mainly because
of their own missteps). But it was obvious even in ~ 2005 that a reliable,
usable social network would kill MySpace dead.

------
PhilipA
What destroys a lot of huge companies? Lack of focus.

------
markbnj
>> “It was one of the most annoying things you could do with an ad, but they
just didn’t care: they had no respect for the users. It was all about
monetisation. Making money, squeezing every dollar out of it,” said Percival.

You can say this about pretty much every traditional news site out there
today. Most of them are just horrible.

------
ajays
He's a "VP of online marketing", not a VP of UX. He wouldn't know what went
wrong.

MySpace had a horrible UX. You felt _dirty_ after browsing a few pages.
Everything was all over the place; the form (UI) destroyed the function
(social network). It was like Geocities and Friendster had a love-child that
was addicted to LSD.

~~~
djcapelis
Stereotypically, no one on LSD would be nearly so tasteless.

MySpace felt more like a raging alcoholic to me.

------
cbsmith
Yeah, this is a guy getting a lot of press about something he was at best
tangentially involved with.

------
encoderer
I think you can't look at the "how MySpace" lost story without considering the
"how Facebook won" angle.

Myspace lost, in part, because it found itself in competition with a company
run by a very talented team with big ambitions and ample connections.

------
spyspaceruled
They should have sold Spyspace as ten bucks a month feature. That was a great
hack, loved seeing who had visited my page and the gotcha of catching some
weird things in my friends cliboards when they visited my page.

------
enbrill
In the article I find these two statements, from Percival, contradicting:

"Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and
admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not
least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented
engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech
companies."

“There are companies that do not get social and they never will. Apple’s one
of them, Google is the other: they’ve failed with Google+. When your culture
is engineering-focused, you do not understand social. Social is a very
emotional experience. Engineers are not so much, in a lot of cases,”

~~~
theandrewbailey
Not contradictory to me. The second statement does not say nor imply anything
about Myspace, or anything about an engineering culture at Myspace.

~~~
enbrill
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough.

In the first quote he basically says MySpace didn't have the engineers to save
the company.

In the second quote he basically says engineers are not what make the social
industry tick. Yes, he's talking about Apple and Google here, but he's
contradicting what he said.

Regardless I'm not sure why he said the first quote in the at all. The problem
they had, had nothing to do with Engineers, but had everything to do with the
company culture.

~~~
theandrewbailey
The first quote is there for the benefit of people who aren't in the industry,
and did not realize that Myspace wasn't hot among engineers in 2009.

You are misconceiving the second quote. That quote is the end of the article,
where it has moved on from the topic of "What happened at Myspace", and is
talking about the social networking industry at large. I do not interpret it
as being a stab at Myspace specifically, nor about what happened there.

------
dec0dedab0de
They messed up the show listings. It went from the definitive listing of every
event in the country, to being unusable overnight.

------
bshimmin
"The baggage was really intense."

What an odd metaphor!

------
Fiahil
It amazes me how they could manage to keep that thing alive for all these
years.

~~~
davemel37
It was the classic "spend a billion to make a million." It works every time!

------
wickedlogic
The customizable web presence is what killed it.

------
frik
There a good book about the whole history of MySpace:
[http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-
Websi...](http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Website-
ebook/dp/B001VT3L3C/)

~~~
softdev12
It was a good read. The most interesting parts were the backstory behind how
MySpace got started. In particular, how the company pivoted a number of times
before getting the social network idea to really catch on. It was fascinating
to see how they went from selling these cheap toys at kiosks in the mall to
becoming a tech media network.

I'm just finishing reading another book called Click by Bill Tancer written
around the same period. And Myspace had 3 out of the top 10 searches for brand
websites (myspace, myspace.com, and www.myspace.com). Facebook had just
appeared on the scene and was in the 10th search spot.

------
nakedrobot2
" “They went to Friendster and found all the hot girls who got kicked off
Friendster. You may remember Tila Tequila. She was a very very big deal on
MySpace. But she was a Friendster user,” he said.

“They kicked her off because she was just too damn sexy. "

UH OK?

I think that we are missing part of the story here. I mean, come on! I stopped
reading at this point.

~~~
wodenokoto
Why do you find it unthinkable that Friendster might ban users for posting
racy pictures?

Of course he is painting in broad strokes in the interview, but MySpace's 'in'
was that they started by attracting creative people, such as wannabe models,
musicians and photographers.

~~~
agumonkey
I don't remember anything even remotely shocking on MySpace, but the mere
presence of people like Tila Tequila was a 'important' factor in MySpace fame
at that point. Wasn't it the first breach between remote celebrities and you
on the web ? Before that all you had was tiny bits of medias, and all of a
sudden, you get to comment on their page. Not even an official website, but
the same website you have a profile on.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
They used to allow nudity, but then their sponsors started cracking down on
them.

