MySpace Is Money

Catharine P. Taylor, aka the Social Media Insider, watched Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson answer Charlie Rose’s questions about MySpace last night.

It’s a 32-minute tape, well worth watching in its entirety. When asked about competing with Facebook, Anderson says they’re not, that FB isn’t primarily interested in making money, whereas they are and always have been.
Taylor adds some depth to the MyFaceSpace discussion:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or five minutes on MySpace or Facebook, to figure out that if Facebook is the Upper East Side, MySpace is Times Square. Ads are everywhere. What’s interesting about this view of their competitive set is what DeWolfe and Anderson didn’t say. While much of the social media world is concerned about embedding marketing into social media in ways that make marketing a welcome part of the social stream, that isn’t as much of a concern for these guys. The big concern, said Anderson, is getting “the advertising world to understand that … what we have is not that different from what Yahoo has, which is a big audience of people.” Are they wrong? Or are the rest of us so hung up on user experience that making money in social networking has become viewed as a bad thing?

No, they’re not wrong. They’re right as rain.