According to Brian Stelter of The New York Times, “the bloom has come off social networking’s rose.”
With a new design to debut this week, News Corp.-owned MySpace intends to do something about it.
With an eye toward monetization, MySpace is being redesigned beginning Wednesday with a new home page, which will be less cluttered and more hospitable to advertising. The redesign, to be done by early fall, will include a new navigation bar, search tool and video player.
On a conference call last month, Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer for the News Corporation, toned down the grandiose expectations for social networking advertising and acknowledged that selling spots on personal profile and group pages is not easy.
Social networking represents an “entirely new form of Internet activity,” Mr. Chernin said.
eMarketer estimates that MySpace will post $755 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 30. MySpace would not comment on the estimate–short of expectations, but still a lot of money.
Marshsall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web says MySpace is “one of the meatiest examples there is of the read/write web. It doesn’t get as much respect as Facebook does in part because the user demographics skew towards working class and poor people.”
Kirkpatrick continues, “While you’re trying to get your parents, your boss or your friends to read RSS feeds, appreciate Twitter or post photos to Flickr – millions upon millions of people are publishing to the web, finding value in syndicated content, reading blogs and leaving comments all thanks to MySpace. If you have a deep dislike of MySpace, you should really consider getting over it. MySpace is a good and important website.”
