MySpace Case Study: Not a purely viral start

Why profiled on Startup-Review.com

In less than 3 years time, MySpace has become one of the top 5 most visited sites in the US, racking up 48 million unique visitors and 27.4B page views in June 2006. While it will probably never come close to the profitability of Google, eBay, or Yahoo, it has the potential to be the Internet’s next “platform” company. It has made for particularly interesting case study material for leapfrogging early social networking leader, Friendster.

Interviews conducted: I interviewed several people who were close to MySpace in the early days, although no longer with the company. I would consider both of these to be excellent sources. I have also spoken to a number of people in the social networking industry – product managers at competitors, MySpace service providers, etc. I am also a board observer at a company that competes with MySpace.

Key success factors

Gave users more control over their MySpace pages, enabling a higher degree of self-expression and communication with friends

While there were many factors that contributed to the MySpace success, if I could pick just one, this would be it. MySpace had its greatest early success with teenagers, and teenagers use the site for sharing pictures, communicating with friends, and creating their best possible “my space” on the web. Having independent music bands anchored on the site for music discovery is a nice complement, but that’s not what is driving the voluminous amount of page views. And yes, people do use MySpace for dating and hooking up, but that type of activity is more popular with 21 – 26 year olds, not the audience that made MySpace what it is today.

I also cannot emphasize enough how important the photo sharing aspect is. The growth in digital cameras and camera phones has been driving the utility of all social networking sites, not just MySpace. MySpace allowed users to add more pictures to their MySpace pages through third party services like PhotoBucket and ImageShack. I strongly believe this was a crucial factor in their success relative to Friendster.