Never accuse Murdoch
Of not telling it like it is
Rupert Murdoch had a Gerald Ratner moment on Twitter earlier today when, in a warning to Facebook, he labelled MySpace - a website he once owned - as "crappy". The media tycoon, who bought MySpace in 2005 for $580m and then copped a $254m loss when he sold the drain-circling website six years later, was responding to reports …
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Try making a profit from Online advertising before valuing yourself for hundreds of billions.
By the way Profit = Revenue - expenditure or Profit = Sales - Costs
Many on Wall Street have been taught by their education establishments up in Cambridge, Massachusetts that Profit = Revenue totally forgetting about the expenditure part of the equation.
...it is a first-rate website for music & musicians etc, I must say. It's nice yet still very functional design, quick - very good. Of course, this change happened years *after* the old, disgusting scumbag, midget turtle the article mentions sold it. Long live MySpace and its musicians...
That is exactly why I left it.
everyday, friends requests from bands - "Hey! Sorry for contacting you this way, but we think you'll love our shit!".
I drew the line when some rapper guy sent me a friends request "Yo, wassup bro, blah blah blah - check out mah tooons you'll luv em, peace out", when, quite clearly, my favourite artists featured bands such as Dream Theater, Spocks Beard, The Flower Kings, etc.
I think most people have gotten over facebook now, to the point where its just ‘there’ its more background noise like 24 hour news in an airport, you check your watch, you skim read facebook, however I have cut down a lot on my skimming due to the aggressive marketing hub it has become, and for stuff I am really not interested in, I joined up years ago as being an army brat this enabled me to get in contact with old international school friends from time spent in the US, Germany, Poland and Hong Kong, it was great, now I still use it for the planning of social events and the running commentary on football games, but apart from that its just full of chain mail crap, or the marketing crap I am not interested in, as a person in the UK, because one of my friends in the US ‘likes’ Obama, I now get ads wanting me to ‘get involved’ with Hilary Clinton running for office, sure, I can edit it so I only see ads I want to see, but the point is I shouldn’t have to, an advert should be something that appears ‘between’ content on TV or in papers, I watch TV, there is an ad break, fair enough, Facebooks content however is 90% adverts, not just on the side, but on timelines, now its adverts broken up with the occasional post from someone I know, and that’s usually someone taking a picture of their food.
This is why users are leaving, Facebook have aimed to much for squeezing every little bit of profit out that they are alienating users, its no longer something you can quickly look at and gather information, its become a chore, a hassle, a bitch, and people just cant be bothered.
While I agree that they have now put too many adverts in the timeline, the crap in between is down to the people you chose as friends and that is your own fault. The fact that almost everyone has this same problem says all you need to know about modern Man, we are all dull in varying amounts for most of the time with 2-3 interesting occurances per year. At 33 that means I have around 141 things to look forward to even assuming I'm more interesting than my mates who send pics of burgers :(
Can't you block the ads with AdBlockPlus?
Best tool I've ever used!
(No idea about MyFace, I've never logged on -- if I use 10minutemail for my email account when I try to register it says my email is invalid; well they ain't getting my real or identifiable address, so I vote with my feet and walk away. Either anonymous or not involved.)
`Rupert Murdoch had a Gerald Ratner moment on Twitter earlier today when .. he labelled MySpace .. as "crappy"'.
I could have told him that before he bought it. The recurring question about `social network' sites is how to make revenue out of them. They're like last-years-fashion, huge while they're popular and then forgotten while the fans move on to the next-big-thing. If you want to stay relevent, what you have to do is continually reinvent the business, always a tough thing to do. If I was in the business, what I would do is try and [re] invent the walled-garden, as in provide a lot of content and usability on the one platform, and charge a subscription, but that's still a tough sell. IOL had that opportunity and totally squandered it.
Indeed. That's one of the things that seems so hard for companies to grasp these days: how to 'make money' without destroying their 'eyeball' base. And part of the reason I refuse to take part in (i.e. program, build websites) along the Web 2.0 social paradigm: I think it's just a scam, I think they have no idea how to really make any revenue without destroying themselves, and it just feels unclean.
Let's take a look at Facebook, one of the more successful Web 2.0 companies. How are they acquiring revenue? Advertisements? Freemium Games? Selling profile data crunched from the accounts of millions?
And how have their eyeballs reacted? People are sick of it. They hate being flooded with erroneous advertisements, pay to play games, and having their private details sold on the open market. It's the snake eating its own tail here...the more Facebook attempts to extract revenue with these methods, the more its destroys its base, the sooner Facebook passes into obsolescence.
Let's face it. These people really don't have a sustainable design for providing a service that people see in a positive light that can also produce a positive revenue source. The fallback for every website seems to be advertising which usually, over time, grows to the point where useful content is displaced with banner and flashing items. They need to innovate / invent a new design if they wish to collect revenue, but have yet to come up with one.
Myspace reinvented itself when Rupert sold up. It's a fairly useable musician's directory these days. Not wonderful enough to want an account, but useful for those who want to viralise their musical output. Kids these days, eh?
Fuddyduddy old bellends like the Dirty Digger are happily using social media to bitch about social media, blithely unaware of the inherent irony.
The reasons I heard from friends on and off the internet for MySpace failing were to many ads, police watching it closely which bothered the ones that partied and had questionable stuff posted, and lastly because Murdoch who owns Fox News bought it "my biggest reason for leaving".
As for Facebook, it's always been lame.
...and farcebook is precisely that I'm afraid. MySpace and BeBo were fads ripe for their time. The dotcom bubble grew and the dotcom bubble burst. But I never got into all this soshul meedya stuff. LinkedIn is as far as I go, and even then, not very often.
I also think the cloud will be a passing fad - might just be starting to see the peak on that now - but I could be wrong (it did happen once - a Thursday I believe...). Humyo for example, came along, great - Bank of England vault for their data center, UK data protection laws so I loved it. Then Trend Micro bought them and shipped it to Germany so I ditched it. Not going anywhere near Amazon or Google.
The trouble with technology is that it moves so fast - driven by marketing and "we've gotta do it first before anyone else does and GET THAT PATENT so we can sue everyone!" Like newspapers - todays news is tomorrows chip-paper, today's tech is tomorrows landfill. I still don't believe we got everything out of the 486 and early pentiums cos MS were powering forward so fast with graphics and Intel and AMD had to keep up.
@Alpha Klutz: If'n y'all are seeing ads on Facebook, yer not doin' it right. Thar ain't no ads on my Facebook or others that I visit. Nope! Nary an advertisement to be found. Not even sponsored ones. T'ain't none in any of the games I play over thar, either.
One day all younz folks might learn to use and properly tune yer filters and be done with all that advertising rot d'em bastids keep throwing at ye (hint: adblockplus, noscript) ;)
Myspace was fine and could have easily developed into Facebook, if only they
had paid attention to its user base. You have to be able to do what you want with
a minimum amount of hassle . People don't mind "some" ads. They are less than
thrilled about arbitrary changes made though.
Ultimately, the users of the social network are the product. All your product to get
poisoned and it goes away.