With the popularity of status updates via Facebook and 140-character tweets via Twitter, MySpace has fallen off the horizon it seems like. It is nowhere near as popular as it once was and MySpace co-presidents have finally caught on and realized it.
This past year, they had lay-offs, management changes, and a dwindling amount of interested spectators. Now, it appears that they are trying to regenerate their growth by launching a new site.
The new MySpace site is said to focus more around media and music, where many young audiences would be influenced, and allow users to listen to playlists and songs that their friends are sharing via their status updates.
MySpace’s ultimate goal is to generate some kind of new era for the MySpace users that have hung around during this terrible time for the social networking site as well as lure back in those that have left and went to other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Co-president Jason Hirschhorn says that he wants MySpace to grow to 200-300 million active MySpace users. Right now, they currently sit around 100-120 million. According to Comscore, January of this year, MySpace had almost 120 million worldwide distinctive visitors, which may sound good off the top of your head, but compared to last year, it is down by a little more than 7 percent; however, it is an increase compared to a few months ago in November when they had approximately 108 million unique visitors.
As for other social networks and their unique visitors, Facebook has 400 million. That is a huge difference between the two.
Analysts are commending on the strategy that MySpace has about building around music and media; however, with so much competition out there in terms of this area of strategy in addition to the amount of visitors that have already left MySpace for other social networks, it will be very hard to come through on. In addition to this, so many new large-scale and high-end corporations (Google, for example) are experimenting with new social networks that it will be hard for MySpace to become afloat again.
