The secrets to MySpace's success?

Last night I attended an event in London called Mashup, where MySpace‘s senior vice president of marketing and content, Jamie Kantrowitz (at right), gave what she called “[MySpace’s] side of our story”. Some interesting figures from Jamie’s presentation:

MySpace has the second largest amount of traffic of any internet site

MySpace has the single largest concentration of young people on the web (Jamie said “on the internet,” but I would be surprised if more young people are on MySpace than are on, say, AOL instant messenger. If anyone has stats about this, please feel free to share.)

99% of MySpace’s content is created by its members (aka ’user-generated content‘)

MySpace has 72 million+ users worldwide, 2.3 million in the UK, with 15,000 new UK users registering daily

MySpace’s sex split is 51% male, 49% female

The average MySpace user logs into their account seven times per month, with an average user session of 21 minutes

And in case you’re wondering how many people it takes to run a monolith like MySpace, the company has 300 employees, 75% of which are technical specialists.

Stats over, what struck me is that whatever success MySpace is enjoying has come from two very simple principles that any company can adopt right this minute:

1) An emphasis for users (that is, customers) on discovery and exploration, not on bombarding them with your own agenda.

2) Providing genuine value to customers - that is, features and services they find valuable (such as the ability to connect easily with others), not that you wish they’d find valuable (like, say, your latest TV ad as a download).

If those are the ‘secrets’ to the MySpace success, here’s hoping that they don’t stay secrets for very long. 

The numbers were impressive but only if accurate. Alexa is reporting slightly different numbers for MySpace. However I think what MySpace has achieved is truly amazing. The problem is will it maintain this growth or will it suffer from people moving to the next big thing? 

The more people personalise their MySpace the less likely they are to abandon it. So “time” maybe the only barrier change as everything else is free.

But I do have one major concern about MySpace.  In their rush to get 100m users I do not see ANY measures in place to protect minors from cyber bullies or paedophiles.  Come one come all is their marketing mantra whoever you are. Cyber Squatters have already proven that your MySpace identity is not always who you say you are. If they do not fix this problem then I think it will come back and bite them very badly.

I’m not sure an brand advertiser would want to be associated with MySpace if it became a grooming zone or pornsite.  MySpace needs to monitor itself better but how do you monitor 75m users?

Sam, you might be interested in reading the Danah Boyd piece linked by me here, where she maintains that MySpace is a more dangerous place for sexual predators than it is for teens.

As far as the numbers go, I think one key thing to remember is that if you’re an ‘eyeball worshipper’ (if you’ve ever said or thought, “We need to get more eyeballs for our website!” you are probably an eyeball worshipper), not all eyeballs are created equal. There are advantages to having tens of millions of ‘users’ (Jamie didn’t say how many of those accounts are inactive), but the fact is that most brands need to be conversing with a few key audiences in order to be successful. It’s less often about 100 million ‘users’ and more about the right 10,000 or so participants.