MySpace lifted the veil on its much-anticipated redesign today, reining in the Wild West approach the social networking pioneer took to date with a far cleaner design focused on young users and entertainment content.
To be sure, the narrower focus of the new MySpace is a concession that the broader social networking play has passed it by. Facebook is now the “all-things-to-all-people” service, and MySpace isn’t even trying to play that game. MySpace is now a portal to all things music, movies, games and celebrity gossip, and it’s designed for a younger generation. So any discussion of whether the new redesign will help it catch up to Facebook should be shelved now.
Facebook has more than 500 million members worldwide while MySpace has less than half that. And according to eMarketer data quoted in the New York Times, MySpace’s ad revenue is predicted to fall from $470 million in 2009 to $297 million by the end of next year, while Facebook’s ad revenue will grow from $655 million to $1.7 billion in the same timeframe.
Now, instead of comparisons to Facebook, start looking for comparisons to MTV. The new MySpace is more a shot at doing what MTV has been trying to accomplish with its Web properties ever since MTV lost the bidding war for MySpace to NewsCorp in 2005 (When NewsCorp acquired MySpace for $580 million).
“They had to focus and identify a core group they could call their own,” says Gartner analyst Mike McGuire. “This is the demographic that seems to be sticking that they can work with and innovate.”
and Cape Town Stadium on April 11.
