This story about MySpace describes the slope that social network applications start heading down once they get big enough. Attract enough eyeballs - 100,000? 1 million? - and you can start to monetize them with advertising. Pull in the really good demographics, and you can start polluting at will.
Business 2.0: How Fox got so sly - Jun. 28, 2006:
Mark Kingdon, CEO of Organic, Dodge's agency for the experimental campaign, says the response was impressive, and Dodge is considering how to further exploit MySpace by, say, inviting its new friends for a Caliber test drive. "Every other medium is polluted with advertising messages," he says. "Social networks are a virgin territory."
For all of its momentum, Levinsohn's approach has many vulnerabilities. One is the possibility - seemingly more remote by the day, but still there - that MySpace will turn out to be a fad.
Not long ago nobody thought that could happen to Friendster, the pioneer of social networking, which recently offered to sell itself to Viacom for about $20 million, say people with knowledge of the talks. When Viacom (Charts) passed, Friendster came back a few days later with a reduced price of about $5 million. Viacom passed.
Will a MySpace full of ads for cars and soap and hamburgers eventually get so "polluted" that the teeming hordes - or more importantly perhaps, the cool kids and trend setters - move on to some other system?
Technorati Tags: myspace, friendster
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