8 ms·

MySpace Still Reaches 50M People Each Month

85 points by gwintrob 12y ago

eastbayjake 12y ago
If anyone from their engineering team wants to share details, there's an open Quora question about engineering at MySpace: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-an-engineer-at-MySpace http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-an-engineer-at-My...
striking 12y ago
This is written like an advertisement. Not trying to knock them, just thought it was worth mentioning that News Corp owns both WSJ and MySpace. Smells like a (mildly informative) advert.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Definitely a bit iffy to publish a "did you know this service we own still exists and is hot, hot HOT?" I also feel like the 50M reach is probably disingenuously presented.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  Apparently News Corp no longer owns MySpace. From near the top of the article: "It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media."
  - droopyEyelids 12y ago
    unless they have a 0% stake, your point is moot.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- anomalous 12y ago
  I'm pretty certain the article goes on to say that it was sold from News Corp 3 years ago to another advertising company. So News Corp hasn't owned it for a while.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TheSoftwareGuy 12y ago
  sometimes I like to imagine what I think would have lead reporters/journalists to investigate what they do. For this one I imagine the reporter was like walking around the offices trying not to make it look like she's worried about the deadline she she needs to have another article in before. At some point she realizes the parent company also owns myspace, does some small amount of research and just writes this in one night and turns it in. Kinda like what a lot of people do with their essays in school.
swatow 12y ago
For some context, that is 1/27 of Facebook's monthly users, or 1/10 of Google Plus'. EDIT: was "1/270 of Facebook's monthly users", now corrected.
- kolistivra 12y ago
  s/270/27/
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  > MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November. So that is actually a hell of a lot better than the headline leads you to believe. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population that - according to the article - checked in on Myspace last November. Yes, I also find that hard to believe.
  - skrebbel 12y ago
    EDIT: I stand corrected, the comment below is bollocks. Honest apologies. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population It baffles me every time when Americans think that the world stops at their borders. What makes you think all these people are Americans? We're talking a 120th of the world's population, what do you find hard to believe?
    - jrpt 12y ago
      It's because the article literally says it's 50.6 million uniques in the US: "Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November. That’s a massive surge of 575% versus the same month in 2013." I read this as implying their uniques (as measured by, say, Google Analytics) were 50.6 million in the US, which probably means less than 50.6 million Americans visited the site in Nov. For instance, if every one of those uniques visited on both their smart phone and their computer, then it'd actually be 25 million real people. The truth is likely somewhere between 25 and 50 million Americans visited in Nov.
      - 12y ago
LeoPanthera 12y ago
"the social networking site that put the very concept of social networking on the map" Friendster?
- jabrams 12y ago
  8-)
- dear 12y ago
  No. ICQ.
- vidarh 12y ago
  For me it was sixdegrees.com (1997)
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  FriendsReunited?
- psykovsky 12y ago
  No, it was Hi5! =)
- 4ad 12y ago
  No, it was BBSs and IRC. And that's probably not right either, I just don't know what was before that. I think "social networking" is an emergent phenomenon once you have some trivial, really trivial technology, and groups of people of some critical mass.
jmarbach 12y ago
Compete reports data that is very inconsistent with the numbers in the article: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ About a YOY 50% decline rather than a 575% increase in November '14.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Third party "analytics" services are highly suspect. They often (usually?) aren't even within the ballpark, either in trend or quantity analysis. http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp... Why these services still exist is beyond me. At best they are worthless, at worst they are fraudulent.
  - ericd 12y ago
    +1, Compete et al are not only usually an order of magnitude off for our sites, they're not even directionally accurate.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
adventured 12y ago
I never cease to be amazed at how old web brands can straggle on. Excite.com is still an approximately top 3,000 US site. As is MyWay.com, which is owned by the same parent as Excite, and looks like it hasn't seen a design update in a decade plus. Lycos still gets a modest amount of traffic. And Digg is still a roughly top 500 site in the US. I put them in the same zombie-former-big-web-brand category as those other sites.
- simi_ 12y ago
  The new Digg is* awesome, and doesn't share any ties with the old Digg. It was bought for a modest amount by this pretty cool company: http://betaworks.com/ http://betaworks.com/ * or used to be? I haven't checked it in ~1 year
  - adventured 12y ago
    I'm familiar with the story, I just don't regard what they're doing as much more than temporarily riding on the glory of the former site, much as MySpace is doing today. Is it a great product? An innovative product? I don't think so, every time I visit digg it comes across as just another aggregator, and there isn't much special about that.
    - prawn 12y ago
      I didn't really visit the old Digg but I visit the new Digg daily and I know of a few others in the same position. Might not be your thing, but it's clean and regular/predictable so I can see how it would attract a new audience.
- benbristow 12y ago
  Mindspark, part of IAC, own Excite and MyWay. Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store. If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.
neura 12y ago
Lots of impressive numbers being thrown around. Seems like they're offering up some stats to get some hype before another sale?
allendoerfer 12y ago
Sometimes I imagine it to be fun to lead a company like MySpace or Yahoo. Something, which was once enormous and is still quite big but declining. Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction … I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time. You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.
- j45 12y ago
  It's like owning your 10th or 15th laptop when many are on their 3rd to 6th. The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one. Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity. Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
  - allendoerfer 12y ago
    > Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks. If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.
    - j45 12y ago
      I wasn't referring to B2C Startups, but agree with you that users are far more valuable than code, but maintaining and refactoring said code can take away from delivering value to the users, and instead more attention can be spent on the the developers.
zaqokm 12y ago
Great customer acquisition cost, less than $1 per user. With ROI at 10 to 20 times, that was a pretty good investment for $35M.
elberto34 12y ago
i'm sure most of those visits are from random search results, not users genuinely interested in the site
artumi-richard 12y ago
My first reaction to this was "MySpace? - some kind of stargazing based website?" before moments later: "Wow! - I completely forgot what Myspace was!"
BorisMelnik 12y ago
In short, it is due to all of the hard links still present from all of the Instagram #throwbackThursday posts OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jsilence 12y ago
I don't get it why the former big social sites don't invest in viable protocols which would allow their userbase to connect to other former walled gardens. Their users stick to the platform no matter what. Why not give them some incentives and more flexibility? Why don't they implement oauth, zot and tent et.al.?
azurelogic 12y ago
Yes, 49.9M people each month visit MySpace after discussing old, washed up websites with their friends and saying, "Does MySpace even exist today?" The other 100K are juggalos and pedophiles.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
oreilco 12y ago
WSJ shamelessly pushing another Murdoch property...
ChrisArchitect 12y ago
sort of unreal to have a 50M number kicking around. Who are these people? If it isn't just spam/misguided links... Seems like a user would have to have serious investment in content or community there to stick around. Perhaps some strong communities hanging on. Still seems pretty crazy since the relaunch/revamp wiped mostly everything out..... defo another one of those straggler online entities hanging on ...I always like to wonder about this 'other internet' people seem to surf that would include dead properties like this...

85 points by gwintrob 12y ago

If anyone from their engineering team wants to share details, there's an open Quora question about engineering at MySpace: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-an-engineer-at-MySpace http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-an-engineer-at-My...

striking 12y ago

This is written like an advertisement. Not trying to knock them, just thought it was worth mentioning that News Corp owns both WSJ and MySpace. Smells like a (mildly informative) advert.

nkozyra 12y ago
Definitely a bit iffy to publish a "did you know this service we own still exists and is hot, hot HOT?" I also feel like the 50M reach is probably disingenuously presented.
greenyoda 12y ago
Apparently News Corp no longer owns MySpace. From near the top of the article: "It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media."
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  unless they have a 0% stake, your point is moot.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
anomalous 12y ago
I'm pretty certain the article goes on to say that it was sold from News Corp 3 years ago to another advertising company. So News Corp hasn't owned it for a while.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TheSoftwareGuy 12y ago
sometimes I like to imagine what I think would have lead reporters/journalists to investigate what they do. For this one I imagine the reporter was like walking around the offices trying not to make it look like she's worried about the deadline she she needs to have another article in before. At some point she realizes the parent company also owns myspace, does some small amount of research and just writes this in one night and turns it in. Kinda like what a lot of people do with their essays in school.

swatow 12y ago

For some context, that is 1/27 of Facebook's monthly users, or 1/10 of Google Plus'. EDIT: was "1/270 of Facebook's monthly users", now corrected.

kolistivra 12y ago
s/270/27/
wodenokoto 12y ago
> MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November. So that is actually a hell of a lot better than the headline leads you to believe. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population that - according to the article - checked in on Myspace last November. Yes, I also find that hard to believe.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  EDIT: I stand corrected, the comment below is bollocks. Honest apologies. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population It baffles me every time when Americans think that the world stops at their borders. What makes you think all these people are Americans? We're talking a 120th of the world's population, what do you find hard to believe?
  - jrpt 12y ago
    It's because the article literally says it's 50.6 million uniques in the US: "Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November. That’s a massive surge of 575% versus the same month in 2013." I read this as implying their uniques (as measured by, say, Google Analytics) were 50.6 million in the US, which probably means less than 50.6 million Americans visited the site in Nov. For instance, if every one of those uniques visited on both their smart phone and their computer, then it'd actually be 25 million real people. The truth is likely somewhere between 25 and 50 million Americans visited in Nov.
    - 12y ago

LeoPanthera 12y ago

"the social networking site that put the very concept of social networking on the map" Friendster?

jabrams 12y ago
8-)
dear 12y ago
No. ICQ.
vidarh 12y ago
For me it was sixdegrees.com (1997)
JonnieCache 12y ago
FriendsReunited?
psykovsky 12y ago
No, it was Hi5! =)
4ad 12y ago
No, it was BBSs and IRC. And that's probably not right either, I just don't know what was before that. I think "social networking" is an emergent phenomenon once you have some trivial, really trivial technology, and groups of people of some critical mass.

jmarbach 12y ago

Compete reports data that is very inconsistent with the numbers in the article: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ About a YOY 50% decline rather than a 575% increase in November '14.

potatolicious 12y ago
Third party "analytics" services are highly suspect. They often (usually?) aren't even within the ballpark, either in trend or quantity analysis. http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp... Why these services still exist is beyond me. At best they are worthless, at worst they are fraudulent.
- ericd 12y ago
  +1, Compete et al are not only usually an order of magnitude off for our sites, they're not even directionally accurate.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

adventured 12y ago

I never cease to be amazed at how old web brands can straggle on. Excite.com is still an approximately top 3,000 US site. As is MyWay.com, which is owned by the same parent as Excite, and looks like it hasn't seen a design update in a decade plus. Lycos still gets a modest amount of traffic. And Digg is still a roughly top 500 site in the US. I put them in the same zombie-former-big-web-brand category as those other sites.

simi_ 12y ago
The new Digg is* awesome, and doesn't share any ties with the old Digg. It was bought for a modest amount by this pretty cool company: http://betaworks.com/ http://betaworks.com/ * or used to be? I haven't checked it in ~1 year
- adventured 12y ago
  I'm familiar with the story, I just don't regard what they're doing as much more than temporarily riding on the glory of the former site, much as MySpace is doing today. Is it a great product? An innovative product? I don't think so, every time I visit digg it comes across as just another aggregator, and there isn't much special about that.
  - prawn 12y ago
    I didn't really visit the old Digg but I visit the new Digg daily and I know of a few others in the same position. Might not be your thing, but it's clean and regular/predictable so I can see how it would attract a new audience.
benbristow 12y ago
Mindspark, part of IAC, own Excite and MyWay. Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store. If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.

neura 12y ago

Lots of impressive numbers being thrown around. Seems like they're offering up some stats to get some hype before another sale?

allendoerfer 12y ago

Sometimes I imagine it to be fun to lead a company like MySpace or Yahoo. Something, which was once enormous and is still quite big but declining. Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction … I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time. You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.

j45 12y ago
It's like owning your 10th or 15th laptop when many are on their 3rd to 6th. The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one. Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity. Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
- allendoerfer 12y ago
  > Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks. If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.
  - j45 12y ago
    I wasn't referring to B2C Startups, but agree with you that users are far more valuable than code, but maintaining and refactoring said code can take away from delivering value to the users, and instead more attention can be spent on the the developers.

zaqokm 12y ago

Great customer acquisition cost, less than $1 per user. With ROI at 10 to 20 times, that was a pretty good investment for $35M.

elberto34 12y ago

i'm sure most of those visits are from random search results, not users genuinely interested in the site

artumi-richard 12y ago

My first reaction to this was "MySpace? - some kind of stargazing based website?" before moments later: "Wow! - I completely forgot what Myspace was!"

BorisMelnik 12y ago

In short, it is due to all of the hard links still present from all of the Instagram #throwbackThursday posts OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jsilence 12y ago

I don't get it why the former big social sites don't invest in viable protocols which would allow their userbase to connect to other former walled gardens. Their users stick to the platform no matter what. Why not give them some incentives and more flexibility? Why don't they implement oauth, zot and tent et.al.?

azurelogic 12y ago

Yes, 49.9M people each month visit MySpace after discussing old, washed up websites with their friends and saying, "Does MySpace even exist today?" The other 100K are juggalos and pedophiles.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

oreilco 12y ago

WSJ shamelessly pushing another Murdoch property...

ChrisArchitect 12y ago

sort of unreal to have a 50M number kicking around. Who are these people? If it isn't just spam/misguided links... Seems like a user would have to have serious investment in content or community there to stick around. Perhaps some strong communities hanging on. Still seems pretty crazy since the relaunch/revamp wiped mostly everything out..... defo another one of those straggler online entities hanging on ...I always like to wonder about this 'other internet' people seem to surf that would include dead properties like this...