MySpace as a click factory?

Mike Davidson has been doing some fascinating work on Myspace in recent weeks. First, the Newsvine boss delved into the site’s decidedly crufty guts to create his own, properly designed template.

Now, he’s done some analysis on the site’s usability, and the impact of that on the site’s remarkable page impression numbers.

His verdict: it’s a click factory. The site could lose at least two-thirds of its page impressions – 30 billion a month to 10 billion – if it cleaned up its design.

The rest of the post is an interesting, if somewhat speculative, discussion on whether or not that would be a Good Thing for MySpace to do. He seems to feel that it might be a good idea as, almost uniquely, Myspace is in a commercial position where taking such a huge page impression blow might not cost it money, and may even make it some more. That said, Davidson notes:

“If any layperson or out-of-touch analyst looked at the second graph above out of the blue, they’d think MySpace had run into something awful. And I only chopped the page views by 2/3rds. It could be a lot more.”

But could such questions point to the fragility of MySpace (and any other social site)?

“I know everyone says MySpace is this unstoppable force that will always be as popular as it is right now, but if I’m them, I’m more paranoid than that. The only company I know of that can stay consistently a step and a half ahead of pop culture is Apple, and even *they* do it to a large extent with user experience.

If you believe Malcolm Gladwell’s principles from The Tipping Point, you believe that all it takes is the right group of 50 influential kids in New York City to start using another social networking service and the pendulum will begin to swing. That’s what people like Fred Krueger and Ted Leonis think, and although I’m not sure whether or not they’ll be the ones to do it, I certainly believe in the fragility of it all.”

And if there’s anything you should believe in, it’s the fragility of that site. Just think Geocities, once worth much more than Myspace – $3.57 billion – but probably, at the time, much less a beneficiary (and thus potential victim) of teenage fashion.

For all that social media can be compelling, to the point of addictive, nobody has managed to combine mass market status with effective lock-in.

BROWSE / IN New Media
« Community is mass market
» The snail, the snail!

COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS

Alex is web 2.0 enemy #1

Over the past month, I’ve begun to spend more of my time on raising capital for Pluggd, and have learned how important Alexa is in the fund raising process. Here is a dirty little secret, on Sand Hill road, they

Castro's Blog thought this on Apr 25 06 at 9:53 pm