Mice Pays
Myspace is an enigma. They don't have a business model, they appeal to people who don't buy anything from them and worse, they've been bought by Rupert Murdoch, the living embodiment of the Simpson's Mr. Burns.
Yet, they're hot. So hot, in fact, that they've made boring old Silicon Valley hot again, too. Venture Capitalists have opened their maws and disgorged the money that they've been hoarding for just such a day. Social networking. Web 2.0. These terms come up often when talking about Myspace, and in just 3 years, they've already spawned imitators and related sites like Facebook and Youtube.
Is the success of Myspace due to their appeal to schoolchildren?
Are they successful because of some pentup desire for pushing content?
Is it the fact they're pushing bands like the Arctic Monkeys?
I suspect that it's none of these things. As much as marketing mavens would have you believe otherwise, viral marketing is a description of a phenomenon, not a premeditated action. Myspace has found pent-up demand for something and like a mosquito that bites down on a carotid artery, it has struck the motherlode.
This newer generation knows computers and grew up with the Internet. They don't want wow, they want something that works for what they want, and that's communication. Myspace is a digital shopping mall, just like IM is a computerized telephone and facebook is this millenium's version of a yearbook. I don't mean literally, of course, but they satisfy the same need.
There is fertile business territory here, catering to the needs of all age groups by providing technologically equivalent versions of what they're already used to, like televisions, phones and yearbooks.
This is the first generation that doesn't believe that anything computerized is high-tech, they discriminate new and old, hip and square, by what the applications do for them, not because they can play pong with it.
Posted on July 05, 2006
