The New York Times is running an interesting piece on MySpace, which receives more than 1.3 billion page views a day and has 110 million members.
For instance, I now know that Chris DeWolfe, the business face of the company, and co-founder Tom Anderson, 37, the product specialist, both recently signed new contracts reported to be worth $7.5 million a year.
But the thing that stands out for me is the realization that soc nets like MyFaceSpace ostensibly function as portals today.
“Some people still perceive MySpace like it was in early 2004, as a niche place for scenesters in New York and Los Angeles. That’s how it started, but it’s become very mainstream,” Mr. DeWolfe, 41, said. “It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture.”
As a result, the MySpace site resembles a portal like Yahoo or AOL as much as a social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform” and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.”
Fox Interactive “clearly envisioned them as a portal,” said Alan Rambam, a senior vice president at the ad agency Fleishman Hillard.
