The blog PuddleGum says MySpace is dying.
The problem I foresee is that it won’t be long before the MySpace bubble bursts. Since most of their users are teenagers, studies show that the masses will naturally migrate to the next big fad, similar to the way they change their circle of friends. Popularity of a website is measured on how long the average user stays on their site and MySpace has already reached its pinnacle, peaking at 2 hours and 25 minutes in October of 2005.
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MySpace is dying, and three million artists will either realize the importance of having their own well developed website or they’ll chase after the next trend, hoping to rebuild their fan-base. I’d rather focus my energies developing my own traffic than nursing off of a corporate monster.
To be sure, there are reports of teens deleting profiles and adults spending more time on the site, but the site still gets a lot of traffic and activity. So the question is, is this a canary-in-coal-mine moment for MySpace, or just the natural churn cycle of a publishing vehicle? Will it evolve, or will it wither?
Teen magazines, for example, have been around for decades, but the readers Tiger Beat had in the 1960s were not the same people who subscribed in the 1980s. Today, some teens will grow bored with MySpace and move onto things they see as more mature pursuits. That doesn’t mean their younger brothers and sisters won’t build MySpace profiles.
One question: Is MySpace more like Shaun Cassidy* or pet rocks or more like Rolling Stone (which started out serving one demographic and grew into something slightly different as the audience changed)?
If I owned MySpace, the thing I would be most concerned about is the failure of the platform to evolve and advance.
PuddleGum says the main point of its post is to encourage bands to get more professional about their Web presense. That is certainly good advice.
*NOTE: I wanted to make sure I spelled “Shaun” right, so in researching I found his IMDB page — looks like he grew and evolved pretty nicely from his teen idol days, so maybe there is hope for MySpace.
[dels]myspace, publishing, fads, teens, shaun cassidy[/dels]
This is a question people ask me all the time (as if I’m some kind of expert… haha). I usually suggest:
If myspace evolves and another fad doesn’t come along soon, then myspace has a darn good chance to stick around. I think myspace should allow people the ability to purchase their own myspace.com urls with some way that people can keep their archives of blogs and such. Otherwise, people like me are only ever just going to use myspace.com as a way to connect to people (fancy marketing tool).
Yes, I’ve connected to some really cool folks… but I think that’s because people in gargantuan numbers have treated myspace like a fad.
Right now people are addicted to it. But it can’t be forever. I don’t see myspace as really contributing handily to my book sales. But maybe that’s because I refuse to spam everyone’s individual sites… so…
Oh, I should add that Google Analytics indicates that 12.5% of my Paperback Writer blog traffic comes from myspace.com. That’s just from posting bulletins and not from blogging on myspace. Only recommended for the small time blogs like mine…