Unless you have been living in a cave, you probably have heard about MySpace. Undoubtedly the best example of “social networking’, MySpace dominates the internet with over 100 million members. Membership is mostly teenagers and “twenty-somethings”, but the membership spans five-year-olds to grandparents. You may be next.
In a nut shell, MySpace provides the member a personal webpage for the user’s photos, blog, and personal profile that is customized for the likes, dislikes, favorite bands, movies, and books of the member. There’s also MySpace mail, instant message, chat, and discussion groups. Many MySpace users have abandoned “old fashioned” email systems like AOL or Hotmail in favor of user-friendly email on MySpace
Webpage members invite their friends to sign up, who in turn invite their friends to sign up. You are allowed search through all the members to find like-minded people who are between certain ages, are looking for relationships, and who live within a few miles of your zip code. See a photo you like? Leave a message for the person and ask to be made a “friend.” You can mark your information as public or private, although a quick tour shows that most pages are public. Parental controls are available for the kiddies, but the content can get risque by Time Magazine standards.
So what’s the big deal? Advertising is now coming to age on MySpace. Literally within the last few months advertisers have started to harvest the MySpace demographics. According to eMarketer’s new report “Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending Update”, 2007 ad spending on US social networking sites is expected to increase to $865 million from $350 million in 2006, By 2010, eMarketer estimates US spending will hit $2.15 billion. MySpace will continue to dominate social networks, accounting for 60% of total US online social network ad spending in 2007. By 2010, spending is expected to rise to $2.8 billion.
That said there are few issues when you advertise onMySpace. MySpace has tightened up the rules for advertisers to such an extent that is easy to be in violation of content restrictions and the like. (see http://collect.myspace.com/misc/terms.html for terms of use MySpace).
I recommend that you visit MySpace.com and familiarize yourself with social networking.
John Bradley Jackson
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