Forum Moderators: phranque
News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told investors at an industry conference Tuesday that the media giant was considering creating a video component to its MySpace social-networking Web site that could rival the wildly popular YouTube.“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace,” Chernin said at the conference. “There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.”
[multichannel.com...]
That's untrue.
almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace
Agree with TomWaits on this comment. I can understand the motivation of the News Corp. COO to spin Myspace's influence in this direction, but anyone who's aware of this space will realize it's false.
I also question the motive in wanting to compete with YouTube -- since YouTube is, thus far, a loss enterprise.
When you have a user base like they do, you need to maximize. It is exactly what Google is doing by pushing new features to the market.
It's a game of eyeballs.. You Tube has the eyeballs and can monetize that anyway they want now... It's stealing eyeballs from MySpace, or at least MySpace could keep those eyeballs on it's own site and consequently the revenue (ad revenue being the obvious one) off of the others.
i wonder, what would happen to myspace, if Google (and maybe Y!) would be offline. is that traffic REALLY created by people going DIRECTLY to myspace, without using a SE? And really created without the people who search for "famous artist"...
P!
You Tube has the eyeballs and can monetize that anyway they want now...
The internet is littered with the corpses of companies that grabbed a lot of eyeballs but never turned a profit.
I can't understand why they haven't been more progressive in this area period.
I think they kinda liked the idea of somebody else handling the bandwidth issues, as they already had their own to deal with.
I think they kinda liked the idea of somebody else handling the bandwidth issues, as they already had their own to deal with.
Excellent point. Most people just put the YouTube movies on their MySpace pages anyway. MySpace still gets the ad credits from page views and it's not as if YouTube forces their viewers to watch a commercial before the clip starts. Maybe that is what they should do instead. Then you can claim ad revenue for every embedded video on MySpace.
After hitting a billion members, MySpace...
There's a physical impossibility for them to have 1 billion real members. 1 billion accounts (or member names) - maybe.
YouTube is about the content. Production quality and novelty are of great importance. And, increasingly, it's being used for more serious topics. While there are comments and favorite lists, community takes a back seat. There are a lot of trivial, amateurish videos, but the ones that make it to the top are either very novel, very well-made, or both.
MySpace is about the community. Production quality takes a back seat. Indeed, the stereotypical MySpace page is practically unreadable, and many members take pride in such.
YouTube videos show up in local media increasingly. It seems I see one on the local news nearly every day. They are always credited to YouTube.
The demographic of MySpace is just to young (Meg aside...) to be taken seriously. I doubt it can be any serious competition to YouTube unless they can change their over-all image. In doing so, they may well lose the demographic that has made them.
i wonder, what would happen to myspace, if Google (and maybe Y!) would be offline. is that traffic REALLY created by people going DIRECTLY to myspace, without using a SE? And really created without the people who search for "famous artist"...
I rarely see myspace rank for anything. It became popular by word of mouth and viral marketing.
MySpace has had its video section and video player for a while now. It includes being able to embed videos in your blog posts or site pages and you can comment on videos. I think News Corp are only really talking about doing some work on an existing area of their site with ratings/favourites etc.
From the article it is just some suit trying to impress investors.
Why don't they tidy up what they've got?
This is pretty simple. They have two options:
1. Wait for their users to grow up.
2. Disable background images.
Option 1 could take a while, so I'd recommend Option 2. ;)
