Article Subject: The demise of MySpace - Online Dating Briefs by Dr. Dato

Dr. Dato’s Brief:

It is worth mentioning in this post of MySpace since a while back it did serve to some degree the ‘online dating’ to the masses that were once using it with such fervor.

I remember, at that time when I was in the 4th year of operation with Jumpdates.com (2004), I had the notion of offering my dating users the ability to tailor their web pages and along came MySpace.com and completely took over the social market scene pulling in millions of users in a very short period of time.

At that time, you have to remember that the words ’social websites’ was not a common terminology used by people and MySpace simply became MySpace in much the same way as Google is called none other than Google, indirectly fulfilling a crucial part of the internet space.

Many users were buzzed by MySpace and as it gathered momentum it took over permanent positions in the tabloids of prominent newspapers.. almost every week. MySpace also gained a bit of notoriety in much the same way as Craigslist today on the subject of people hooking up through the sites. However, there wasn’t really any competition in this space that MySpace happily occupied for a good part of 4 years and it was snatched up for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation. Here is when the problem started arising.

In my opinion, the people who purchased it didn’t really understand how to leverage it or make money from it because for the longest time, the site remained unchanged in looks, functionality improvements were absent from the site. Of course, most of us know what happened a few years back when Facebook came onto the scene and stole the show around 2008 and the words ’social sites’ became a buzzword. Unfortunately, the changes for MySpace came too late and a revamp of it’s website wasn’t going to help them.

Today, MySpace has gone from 70 million unique users to 45 million unique users from last year which places the website in a difficult position to recover. Most analysts now predict the demise of MySpace and also a takeover bid ranging in a few millions of dollars, a far cry from the $580 million paid back in 2005.

We can actually take away a good lesson from all this and that is at the end of the day, you the end user rules and no matter what kind of product and services that may wow Wall Street, it will have little impact if it doesn’t harmonize with all of us.

myspace is a bit too late in the market