MySpace vs Facebook

Facebook’s open source strategy has raised the stakes in global social media development, posing a competitive threat to MySpace in particular. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of MySpace, has taken note but isn’t overly concerned yet. Speaking in New York earlier this week, Murdoch said: “We can acquire them or just be better, different and develop more – we’re doing the latter because as far I’m aware it’s not for sale. It’s still infinitely smaller than MySpace and we’re becoming increasingly different though there remains a lot of overlap.”

Facebook’s customers like the open source approach and the accurate personal history mining that comes with the site. In contrast, MySpace had taken large safety measures to avoid such an approach. "If you wanted to stalk a young girl on Facebook, it would be very easy,” jokes Murdoch. A look at various metrics tell us that MySpace users visit the site 30% more times per month than Facebook users and that they spend 30 minutes more on the site per month. MySpace’s focus on media is also becoming a major source of differentiation from Facebook, driven by the success of MySpaceTV, which is now the second largest video streaming site after Google's YouTube. However, advertisers may become increasingly attracted to the enhanced quality of demo data available from Facebook as its closed network has meant that most of its users are honest in providing data. It's a headache for MySpace that may not go away with a focus on just differentiation.

Here's another take on social media and the Facebook vs MySpace saga.

Comments (0) | Post a Comment | Link