Now that News Corp. has finally sold Myspace to Specific Media, we’re all left to wonder what they are going to do with it. Mind you, even though the social network collapsed, at the supposed $30-$40 million that it was sold, it’s still quite a deal. Specially given the fact that News Corp. paid a whole lot more for it 6 years ago.
At this point, it’s very hard for anyone to imaging Myspace going up in popularity again. Unfortunately, the constant losses to Facebook has rendered the network “uncool”. You can be unknown, you can be hated, but being “uncool” is probably the worst of the bunch. If you’re unknown, you can always have a breakthrough and become known. If you’re hated, well that’s bad enough, but you can still benefit from it. But being uncool, is like being lukewarm. Hot coffee is good, so it cold coffee; but lukewarm… not so much! It just seems the new owners are either going to ride out what little life the network has left to make a profit over what they paid (before the network completely fizzles away) or they will have to come up with a completely different concept to try and grow (in order words, many risks). Unfortunately, all those redesign tries didn’t quite seem to work for News Corp. Specific Media is going to have to get pretty creative. However, for the old owners to recover their loses they needed a smash hit. The new guys wouldn’t need much to get a return on their investment.
Given that Myspace pretty much introduced most of us to social networking (unless your age is 50 right now) I’m sure we all have good memories of it. Being on Myspace was like having your own website, without all the trouble. It was cool to mess with CSS and come up with new backgrounds, headers and menu pictures for your profile. Somehow, we all thought that was extremely important. I guess not, since Facebook completely trumped it with an interface that was barely customizable. Having said that, I think the major blow to Myspace was and is Facebook’s appeal to all ages. Just think about it. 5 years ago the things there were important to us on Myspace are not important to us anymore. Meaning, we grew up. Facebook knew this and basically created a catch-all for all those growing up high school and college kids.
