Wednesday, May 03, 2006

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.