eMarketer predicts that social network advertising will account for nearly 11% of all online ad spending in the United States by the end of this year. According to the research firm, US marketers will spend a little over $3 billion to advertise on social networking sites this year, up 55 percent from the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010.
eMarketer projects this number will rise by a further 27.7% next year to reach nearly $4 billion.
The 2011 forecast for online ad spending in the United States is $1 billion higher than eMarketer’s last estimate of US social network ad spending, made in August 2010. → Read More
Whenever a company lays off 500 people, as MySpace did earlier this week when it gave half its employees walking papers, it generates quite a bit of anger and bitterness. The latest tip in our inbox from a dispirited former employee goes into a details about do-nothing managers who still have their jobs while all their underlings are now unemployed.
I won’t repeat the character assassinations here, but the former MySpacer did include something else I will share: The kiss-off letter from CEO Mike Jones. “He didn’t even take the time to personally sign the letters. It’s just a xerox copy,” laments the former employee. You can read the termination letter below. It is pretty standard, thanking those being laid off for their “dedication and commitment to MySpace” especially through its recent relaunch.
This is the part, though that must really rankle: → Read More
An email from a reader claiming to be a MySpace employee about the layoffs today that left half of the company out of work. These things are part of life, but the bitterness, anger and feeling of betrayal are striking.
The email is below. → Read More
Things only seem to be getting worse for MySpace. Amid reports that the troubled social network is for sale by parent company News Corp., MySpace has just announced massive layoffs at the company. According to PaidContent, MySpace has cut 47 percent of its staff or nearly 500 employees.
Apparently, CEO Mike Jones said the cuts were necessary to “provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability.” On a side note, that could be the most-used sentence in press releases announcing massive layoffs. → Read More
The MySpace talent exodus continues, and Zynga seems to be taking more than its share. In 2010 they hired Dani Dudeck, formerly a MySpace VP, to run the communications team. Soon after former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta joined Zynga as an EVP.
Now, we’ve learned from multiple sources, they’re hired two more. Katie Geminder, a level 51 Cityville player and formerly head of product at Facebook and SVP of User Experience and Design at MySpace, joined Zynga late last year. And Christina Wodtke, GM of social at MySpace, has resigned and will start at Zynga in the next week or so. → Read More
Myspace and Google this morning announced that they have reached a multi-year agreement to renew and expand their search and advertising relationship. It’s unclear how long the deal will stand this time, but three years like the former agreement sounds plausible.
Whether Myspace will still be around when the new deal expires remains to be seen.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Google will continue to power Myspace search functionalities and advertising, and will also provide additional display advertising services. → Read More
While News Corp. is now openly admitting that it is exploring options for Myspace (don’t call it MySpace anymore!), the company is still executing, albeit slowly, on its mobile strategy.
This morning, the company announced that it has launched a new mobile website to extend its “social entertainment experience” to mobile devices across the board.
The company will soon release a brand new iPhone app to boot. → Read More
A lot of people out there still seem to think that all blogs do is riff off of major media content. Reblog it, or just plain plagiarism. Most people know that most major news is now broken by blogs, but the prejudice is still out there.
One thing we abhor is “the unattributed rewrite,” When some publication takes a story that was broken by someone else and simply rewrites the same story in their own words without any attribution to the source of the story. It’s just not done by reputable sites, whether they’re blogs or mainstream media. A simple “the story was first broken by the Associated Press,” or whoever, is the honorable thing to do.
Speaking of the Associated Press, they’ve stepped in it again. → Read More
t was just a couple of years ago that MySpace wasn’t all that concerned about the fast growing Facebook. Fast forward two years and a handful of CEO changes, and everything has changed.
Last summer MySpace found a way to get MySpace status updates into Facebook. And today at noon at a special press event that everyone was invited to except us, they’ll announce more integrations. And it’s ok that we weren’t invited, because we now know exactly what they’re announcing.
The event is less of a partnership announcement and more of a formal surrender ceremony. → Read More
A simple question on Quora yields some fascinating comments: “Is MySpace likely to recover?”
Google VP Corporate Development David Lawee left a brief and sarcastic “Is this a real question?” response. Which is noteworthy because Google is a major advertising partner to MySpace. Generally speaking, partners are nice to each other in public, but not here.
Investor Chris Fralic says “Define recover.” → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
MySpace is mere hours away from their big redesign push (our early review is here). If you’ve got nothing to do until midnight California time, spend it perusing this document. It is, according to an anonymous source that claims to work at MySpace, an internal MySpace document showing traffic and engagement by age band.
And it’s on Google, publicly. → Read More
MySpace is preparing to roll out its long-awaited redesign, perhaps as early as tomorrow, at least for new users. It’s not going to be pretty. Well, actually, it is quite pretty—I’ve seen screenshots—but that still might not be enough to help stem the diminishing appeal of the social network. MySpace tried to brief us on the new design under embargo, which we don’t do, so we declined the briefing. Nevertheless, we keep getting snippets of information from various sources.
So let me describe it for you. The design will feature the new MySpace logo at the top, and center around discovering and sharing media—music, photos, and videos. When you log in, a big status bar will prompt you to “Share something!” That can be a status message, a link, a photo, or a video. → Read More
A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about a supposed Facebook privacy breach. We and others noted that the article was complete rubbish. We also noted that the Wall Street Journal’s sister company, MySpace, wasn’t mentioned in the article – either as a disclosure of a conflict of interest or a discussion of whether MySpace was doing the same thing.
The WSJ was actually investigating MySpace, says a source close to the company, and were planning on publishing the information the investigation uncovered.
MySpace has had three different CEOs in the last two years, as well as a period where they were led by co-presidents. If you count Jon Miller, who runs the whole show, they’ve had four CEOs. Based on MySpace’s overall level of disorganization and constant leadership changes, we’re not surprised that the WSJ investigation landed on their doorstep, and discovered questionable privacy practices.
But the story was shelved. → Read More
The new MySpace logo or the new Gap logo, which do people hate more? It seems to close to call at this point. But after days of sitting back and taking a beating, Gap logo is on the offensive now — on Twitter.
“That new MySpace logo? I mean I know I have very little room to talk but holy shit,” Gap logo writes in a tweet today that is currently setting Twitter ablaze with retweets. → Read More
If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably realized that logo redesigns are a kind of a big deal. Today at the Warm Gun Design conference in San Francisco, butt of too many design/user experience jokes to mention social networking site MySpace unveils their new logo which is, get this, the word “my” in Helvetica and then a symbol delineating a space.
MySpace VP of User Experience Mike Macadaan explains the philosophy behind it, “MySpace is a platform for people to be whatever they want, so we’ve decided to give them the space to do it.” Apparently the blank space to the left will be filled with user generated artwork when users hover over it on the redesigned site. → Read More
Whatever MySpace has up its sleeve for its upcoming mid-October relaunch apparently isn’t enough to keep all the remaining execs at the company. Vice President of Communications Tracy Akselrud has resigned from MySpace and has joined Brew Media Relations.
Akselrud joined MySpace in 2006 and was second in command in the communications group until SVP Dani Dudeck left the company earlier this year to run corporate communications for Zynga. Akselrud ran the communications group until the company hired SVP Rosabel Tao. → Read More
It’s no secret that embattled MySpace is working on a complete redesign of its site in hopes of reversing the staggering loss of users and traffic over the last couple of years. In December 2008 MySpace had 125 million unique visitors and 43 billion page views. Today they have 95 million unique worldwide monthly visitors and…wow…just 12 billion page views (Comscore).
The redesign is meant to be a dramatic restart to get users excited about MySpace again. Futura, which is the internal name for the project, is set to launch for some users on October 15, although our sources say that date may slip. It will include a much simpler interface, lots of white space, and a focus on the activity stream, say our sources. Much like Facebook.
Many of the design elements were lifted from the Remaking MySpace project that was terminated after CEO Owen Van Natta left the company earlier this year, we’ve heard. And many of the changes are just obvious and are intended to clean up the site. → Read More
One good thing to come out of MySpace’s slow demise: a bunch of former employees are creating startups left and right, mostly in Los Angeles and helping to grow the startup ecosystem there. We’re tracking Gravity, Mindjolt, Gogobot and Beachmint. And we’re adding one more to the list.
Namesake was founded by Dan Gould and Brian Norgard. The site is still in private beta and it’s not 100% clear what it will be. From the about page: → Read More
