Still a place for friends?
Can life be breathed back into MySpace? After years of being a top social media site, Myspace took an embarrassing plunge into oblivion. The mighty had fallen and fallen hard.
As the site seemed to be on its last leg entrepreneur, Tim Vanderhook of Specific Media saw an opportunity to get the site cheap at $35 million dollars and tapped entertainer super star Justin Timberlake to be an investor and help lead the site back to life. Whether that makes MySpace reborn or just a zombie is still undetermined. But zombies are popular this year, so perhaps it won’t matter which it comes back as, as long as it comes back?
The sale, which happened in the summer of 2011 went by fairly quietly. Who cared? Most people had either cancelled their profiles or forgotten they had one. But, as people remained unimpressed with, yet another, change at the helm of MySpace, the new owners quietly, methodically and smartly began to make changes that would eventually bring the site back to the media with at least some interest and curiosity.
There has been a lot of positive movement in the last three months with Roger Mincheff, who has brought Fox Digital to Myspace, was named President of MySpace Entertainment this week. Mincheff was Senior Vice President of Branded Entertainment with Fox Filmed Entertainment and has a proven track record of success in the industry. Serious content procurement seems to be high on the priority list of the new MySpace leadership.
Having Justin Timberlake as an investor and active member to the MySpace leadership team also brings in serious talent and opportunities in the music and film industries.
MySpace has partnered with Panasonic earlier this year. MySpace TV will be available on next generation Panasonic HDTVs. This is a move that Google made a couple of years ago when it partnered with Sony. Most of the MySpace channels will be music oriented to begin with, most likely due to the influences and affluence of Justin Timberlake, but the idea is to expand to other original content.
MySpace became more interesting in February of this year when it announced its gain of over 1 million registrations with its new music player. To see any positive momentum happening to the lost-giant of social media is encouraging, but can they keep it up? And, for those of us in the publishing industry what does that mean?
Our predication is that MySpace will continue to concentrate on its main staple; music. It is obviously looking to branch out to original content such as the newly acquired webisode from Fox Digital Entertainment “Let’s Big Happy” which will premiere March 28th. And it is here that publishing stands to get a piece of this fresh pie. With more webisodic content being created that features authors or is book-themed it stands to reason that MySpace would be more open minded to that kind of original content as it looks to bring in a broader variety of content for MySpace users.
The bottom line is, there’s something actually interesting going on at MySpace for the first time in a long time. Will the site evolve into greatness again? It’s hard to say. But, perhaps you should dig around for your old MySpace profile password just in case.
