How does MySpace miss the social throne?

The writer is the freelance author of the Guardian Stuart dredge. The author wrote this article based on a speech by Sean Percival, the former vice president of online marketing at MySpace, at the By:larm meeting.

Sean Percival, a startups partner at Silicon Valley's start-up accelerator, was the online marketing vice President of social networking MySpace in 2009-2011-the time when MySpace's throne in the social arena was taken away by Facebook.

At the By:larm meeting just in Oslo, Norway, Percival re-examined what MySpace did wrong.

Early MySpace

"MySpace was not a company at first, it was a marketing company project. The company has been involved in E-commerce in the very early days, but the basics are junk-weight-loss pills, small remote-controlled airplanes and the like. Percival.

"2003 years ago, they looked at Friendster (a social networking site) and said, ' Wow, people are willing to spend so much time on a Web page. We should also do a similar. ' At this point they just want to be a social network that allows people to play on it, and then they can guide the site to what they sell. This is the beginning of MySpace. ”

' It seems that early MySpace can be a pioneer in influencing marketing, ' says Percival. They went to the Friendster and found the net-red girl who had been sealed off by Friendster. Like Tila Tequila, the girl in MySpace was the absolute size, but she was actually a Friendster user in the early days. "he said.

"Friendster her, because her hair was so ' sexy '. At this point MySpace throws an olive branch, ' as a company from Los Angeles, we don't care how explicit your hair is. Get in here. They just pull those nets to MySpace. ”

In addition to these Internet reds, MySpace is also courting bands, photographers and other creative people who are attracted to fans to join MySpace. It also made Percival think that it would be possible to set up an outsourcing company to help companies, brands make MySpace homepage, and develop their own fan network. But it happened that MySpace itself was trying to make money for business owners in those areas, so after receiving a scary legal statement from MySpace, Percival turned off his project.

After being acquired by News Corp

Percival has watched MySpace for years, watching it grow, and watching it sell to News Corp in 2005 at 580 million dollars. The impact of the Percival on MySpace was still felt by the time the blogger joined MySpace in 2009.

"News Corp is a behemoth, with a good billions of of the money, a good billions of users." I remember when the takeover, News Corp said ' nothing interferes ', would make the company run as it used to. They say MySpace is so special that they keep it running as it is. ”

Percival said it was a set of superficial rhetoric. But in the aftermath of some technology companies ' acquisitions, such as Facebook's takeover of Instagram or WHATSAPP, we can see that these acquirers have learned a lot from the mistakes that News Corp made when they didn't keep their promises.

"In fact, over time, the group's policy interference has gradually penetrated MySpace," he said. A lot of lawyers came in, a lot of accountants came in, and a lot of things have been infiltrated into every aspect of MySpace. Tech companies like MySpace were supposed to move as fast as a sports car, but the pace of MySpace slowed after the takeover. "Percival said.

"It's been a big problem for me," he said. I want to do a very basic thing, as a result a lot of flow to run. We have 四、五十个 lawyers in our staff, and we spend 800,000 dollars a month on the outside lawyer service. ”

"We were subjected to a full-scale attack. The Justice Department is constantly bothering us because there are some very bad things about sharing on MySpace: paedophilia related. Things like this continue to happen on MySpace, and we are tired of coping and unprepared. ”

And the result? "A company that is supposed to be on the move is becoming more institutionalized and bureaucratic. Too many process systems, greedy cells, these particularly bad things come along with News Corp's acquisitions, gradually penetrating MySpace. "Percival said.

They know the end is set

MySpace was still the biggest web site in 2009, but Facebook's rise has since started and has been swift. According to Percival, MySpace morale was so low that everyone was defeated and dejected.

"I remember the first time I joined the team and it was the most dejected meeting I've ever had in my life," he said. Everyone was sitting there, really just sitting there, with a look of collapse. ”

"I often use a metaphor, is ' half coach '." When I walked into MySpace, it was like a coach coming near the game after Half-time, and now it's only half way through, and your team is 100 points behind. They're not beaten by something else, it's the bureaucracy of big companies. They know they're about to lose to Facebook, where you can smell the war coming to an end. ”
Becoming bloated is one of the main failures of MySpace, Percival said. MySpace later spawned many modules, celebrities, fashion, sports, and even library modules.

"I can tell you that literary fans will never go to MySpace to discuss new books!" MySpace at the time stretched its tentacles into all the places it could reach, and that was a very serious mistake. Facebook knows what it can and can't do. The lesson here is that you can do a good job on a lot of things, but you have to choose one thing and do it to the extreme. For us at the time, we all did everything, but they were all rotten. ”

Percival mentions that MySpace, at its peak, had almost 100 million users-hardly comparable with Facebook's 1.39 billion users as of the end of 2014. This is thanks to Facebook's globalisation and the iterations and popularity of smartphones.

MySpace did try to globalize, but basically what they did was "fill up offices all over the world". "We've wasted hundreds of millions of of dollars on this, struggling to build a team, struggling to deal with every local music copyright issue, and so on." ”

"I'm pretty sure we're losing money in almost every region of the market, except for Mexico," he said. But Facebook's globalisation has been smooth, and Facebook's people have said: ' We don't have to worry about building a team everywhere, and these costs are going down. ’ ”

The whole site is in disarray.

Percival mentioned that MySpace spent hundreds of millions of of its own content distribution network (CDN), while most other companies chose to use cloud services directly from third parties, such as Amazon.

"More and more money is wasting away. I don't know what the total is, but it should be billions of dollars in size. Thanks to News Corp's money, it's the only way to burn it. "he said.

"The site is like a lump of pasta, we are no longer as sharp as before, regardless of the system or business." ”

Percival said that MySpace's fatal blow came from Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the parent company News Corp. Rupert Murdoch said in a conference call that MySpace's profit target for the year was 1 billion dollars.

"At that time our annual income was about 50 million to 100 million dollars, which reached only one-tenth of the 1 billion." Percival said, "he released the news to the outside world, but as far as I know, no one at MySpace has received this instruction." We are like ants on hot bricks ... ' The boss wants us to make 1 billion this year!? Let's try to make 1 billion this year. ’”

"That's why we have a product like MySpace Books Online." It's not because our users want to talk about books, but someone wants to sponsor us to do this--harpercollins publishing house. So we did something like that for 250,000 or 500,000 dollars in sponsorship. This kind of thing is everywhere in the company at that time. ”

Percival recalled the infamous advertisement they had made, named Punch the Monkey. This advertisement said is an award-winning game, guide the user clicks the picture the monkey "receives the prize", but actually is links to a survey website, the user needs to register the account then to apply for the credit card or other service can obtain the so-called "the prize".

"It's the most outrageous ad you can imagine, but they just don't care: they don't have a little respect for their users." This is what they do for all business purposes. Make money, squeeze every dollar clean. "Percival said.

"Think about Facebook at the time and they don't focus on the cash at that stage," he said. They rarely sell ads, and if they do, they are very high quality ads. Most of the ads they do are native, naturally, not Punch the Monkey. ”

Percival said he had wanted to build a better new user "landing" process and an old user return incentive during his MySpace lead online marketing day. "I'm trying to dispatch our development resources to do this, but the answer is no, no, no, we have to rush to develop Punch the Monkey 2.0, and the company has to raise profits."

Once the secret: we tried to buy Spotify

Can MySpace be saved? Percival said the company had a chance to move to a completely different path, but it may have been late when he joined the company in 2009. By the year 2009, it has been hard to find good engineers willing to work for MySpace, but to Facebook, Google and other vibrant technology companies.

"I was always trying to push one thing, I tried to push it internally, but it didn't work: Change the name. At that time, the name MySpace was not cool. "Percival said.

"Too much baggage." Users have had too many bad experiences on MySpace. They're on our website and there's tons of junk mail to find them, and there are so many bad experiences like this. The user's negative emotional baggage to MySpace is too serious. ”

Percival also said he believes MySpace should bet on music when it feels Facebook is about to win the Social war.

"We never wanted to admit we lost the social War, but Facebook won. Users on Facebook have real names and full names, and users on MySpace are ' 420princexxx ' with meaningless stuff. Users gave Facebook their confidence. ”

"So we lost the war. But in fact we should be betting on music after we realize it. At that time MySpace had a very unique agreement with the record companies. MySpace is the only streaming media on the internet where you can hear all the artists for free. ”

"Now you can listen to the song at Spotify for free, but the pattern was unique at the time," he said. It's a very special deal, and we pay record companies 10 million of dollars a year to keep the deal--and just to maintain it. Then we pay them separately for the copyright charges. This free streaming media music model was only MySpace, and no one else had it. ”

Percival thinks Spotify is the most successful of MySpace's fall behind in the context of adding social networking to music products.

"But what outsiders don't know is that we tried to buy Spotify, but it didn't." They certainly don't want to sell it to us, they don't have to. "he said. He argues that Spotify has a better chance of socializing than the two giants of Apple and Google.

"Some companies have not done or made social, and will never do." Apple is one of them, and Google is one of them. Google + also screwed up. When a company's culture is too engineer-driven, it doesn't know how to socialize. Socializing is a very emotional experience, and engineers usually don't feel particularly emotional. "he said.