In the words of Yogi Berra, its like deja vu all over again.
Every weekend I wake up, make myself a nice cup of coffee, pour it in my lovely Apple coffee mug, and turn on the computer. Only to find the same stories, different publications. You Tube not getting premium advertisers because of the content issues is a recurring theme. We mentioned this problem about 300 cups of coffee ago.
Or the latest piece in NYT on MySpace, its advertising challenges and the future of community. It seems like one big mash-up of three of our old pieces here, here and here. The only interesting bit in the Times story is the planned expansion to Europe.
With the News Corporation’s help, he is opening an office in London to coordinate MySpace’s expansion in Europe. He is cutting deals to let members connect to MySpace over cellphones.
Is that a realization that the growth in the US is going to peter out? If yes, then they are smart to think about the day when the network meets its outer-limit. How successful will MySpace be in Europe? That is an interesting question to ponder about!
myspace will work in eu no doubt – london alone has the most unsigned bands in the world. myspace is perfect for this.
i agree with you on that, though i wonder if they might have to increase the asthetics appeal of their service. we know how europeans are about that – picky!
MySpace is white hot in the UK, especially since the #1 indie band, The Artic Monkeys uploaded their music and built a following via myspace.
My son who is a teenager says all the kids at school already have accounts…
I’ll second Keith’s comment – MySpace is already huge in the UK.
MySpace will live and die in Europe based on how well it integrates and is useable via a 3G capable cellphone. Here in the states MySpace got its big boost in users because at the time MySpace was starting Friendster’s site was running slow as molasses in December and a whole host of popular folks jumped ship and in turn dragged their friends and friends friends along to MySpace in a deep level recusrsion style scouring. The better question I suppose is, what is being used in lieu of MySpace in Europe right now?
I think they got the right “envelope”: SMS. Now, whether or not they have the right “content”, is up to debate. Let us not forget the red-hot adopters of social networking weren’t Americans: It was the Brazilian takeover of Orkut two years ago. Europeans are the late-adopters in this case, which reinforces even more the importance of the “content” used to attract them.
Bands are a good attraction for the Brits. But what about everyone else? Will the French really go for a service dominated by Americans? Are Germans generally that open to the self-expression of MySpace? The self-expression “content” which resonated so well with the American youth may not work so well in different cultures.
Oh and lets not forget, how long is it going to take for Germany or Frace to sprout some kind of legal test case regarding culture or neo-Nazi’s on MySpace or the like. Just a thought.
It’s simple .. just a matter of time,
MySpace Mobile = exponential growth
You Tube traffic = advertisement $$$
As they grow, how good will be the content on both sites? It’s a different ball game.
Seriously, what is the difference between going to YouTube to find a video, or just searching for it thru Google. YouTube offers nothing different, and 95% of the stuff uploaded is 30 second clips of complete junk from kids digital cameras. Advertisers who are 1/2way intellingent know this, they’re better served spending their ad dollars elsewhere.
About the MySpace article…
I don’t see Americans interacting w/ Europeans via MySpace but I do think that the power of music over there alone should drive registration numbers. However I think they will live in their own space, and not cross over to the Americans. Safe to say the French and USA don’t get on too well.
99% of the world has never been on YouTube.com=====the world is WIDE OPEN for YouTube.com!
and the BANDWIDTH sucking is 23 megs for a four minute video downloaded so Level3 is going to skyrocket once the MASSES Find YouTube.com
does newscorp buy facebook? it will be interesting to see how many users they retain each year when their young user base has access to facebook (yes they can access high school facebook… but for some reason it doesn’t have the same appeal).
UK is Murdoch’s home turf – he can plug myspace hard in his tabloids and the Times. and of course Sky TV…
In The Netherlands it probably wont work. We have http: //www.hyves.nl, it’s the biggest and most popular social network and I don’t think a US ‘company’ can change that.
None of the big US hypes are picked up by the Dutchies. Blogger? Flickr? del.icio.us? Digg? None of them are really ‘big’ in The Netherlands..
There was a front page article in the Nikkei Business Daily (4th April) announcing that MySpace is coming to Japan.
Language issues may make international communications (and therefore cross border social networking) difficult, but expanding reach for MySpace content beyond native english speaking markets would seem to make sense.
The SNS market in Japan is rapidly increasing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced that SNS site registrations topped 7million by end March 06, up from a shade under 4M at end Sept 05. 2006 is seen to be the year SNS goes mainstream in Japan. However, with even the largest single SNS operator Mixi.jp only hitting 3M registered users in March 06 exactly 2 years from launch, there seems to be plenty of room for growth or new market entrants.
MySpace, which provides a multimedia content delivery not seen in any of the domestic SNS sites, and which also gives users much greater freedom to customize – again a feature which is not seen with any of the major local SNS players, seems to offer something genuinely different to local rivals.
For generic social networking sites which rely on text based communication, international expansion is not likely to exploit network effects (the likely outcome is separate networks which are extremely weakly connected, the links between networks provided by members who are able to socialize in both networks because they are bi-lingual/cultural. We might see some memes traversing the network boundaries, however intensive linking between network nodes is unlikely). For communities that revolve around non-text based content, be it music, video, images, the equation is altered somewhat. And for the likes of Mr Murdoch, exploiting network effects to promote the content they own seems like an eminently sound strategy.
from what i have heard from an insider…myspace europe will be NO different than the US brand…all of the same design (or lack of) and functionality…the only difference will be in the available locations for your profile
you can’t blame them…with the success of myspace in the US…who would want to rock the boat? for an initial lunch at least