What happened to MySpace?

I'd agree with this

I've never even bothered with Myspace, but because all my friends relatives etc belong to facebook I also bit the bullet a year ago and it's now one of my very fave sites. (On there all the time). Friends and relaitives on there range in age from teenagers to my 80 year old dad living in Canada.

To be honest I don't use facebook for marketing because I enjoy it too much just as a social interactive tool.

Can't be doing with all that stupid farmville stuff though, what's that all about!

Kim

The thing I always had to do when visiting MySpace was to turn my speakers off. It's too bad they didn't have an option to turn the bad designs off.

As others have mentioned, I think it's the poor design that turned a lot of people off to MySpace. A lot of people customize their MySpace pages and do so very badly. They created pages that were difficult to read, a pain to navigate, or just plain obnoxious.

On the one hand, it's good to give people control. But, on the other hand, when the goal is "networking", obnoxious profiles run counter to that. That is, after a while, you just get tired of looking at so many bad pages and, when a new friend request comes in, you don't really want to look at their profile to check them out because the chances are high that your eyes will suffer. And, so you look to alternatives.

I don't think that was MySpace's only problem, but I think it was a significant part. And, it would be difficult for them to clean up, because they'd upset a good portion of their remaining userbase. It may, however, give them their best shot at rebuilding the brand, but the risks to doing that may be high. They may be better off starting a new service and migrating the older crowd to it.

Also, I think the silly games that Facebook has have also helped them. People have to check in regularly (daily?) in order to take care of their farm or Mafia hits or whatever. So, once they're addicted to something like that, they have to keep coming back, and they drag their friends there too.

They also said the Titanic was unsinkable.

You're definitely speaking for me.
Facebook is easier to use and has a cleaner layout/design. Which I think attracts a lot of people. It's like comparing Google and Yahoo. There's a reason why the only thing on Google.com is their logo and the search bar.

Also, the ever-increasing spam on Myspace became a bit too much.

I think this is a very important point to make, myspace was utter entropy from when it came out and still is, with everyone trying to compete for the worlds most chaotic webpage award.

Facebook by comparison standardised everyones page to have the same basic elements so you pretty much knew as you were loading it up what you were going to be facing.

While freedom of speech may be a good thing, it doesn't half make a bloody racket ~ Sparhawke, 2010.

I tried their ad system a couple of times.
Most recent was during the last quarter of 2009 for the Christmas season.
ROI was not very impressive. Adwords easily out performed 10 to 1 in a niche I thought would do well there.
Best results were from game ads directed at early to mid teen females.
Fashion type games seemed to do best.
Conversions had little impact on Christmas sales.

Another example: we utilized myspace for branding a country music band and did do fairly well for visits to the website. Mostly female of ages 11 to 16. Physical attraction to some of the band members seemed to be the leading motivator for many of the visits. (banners with band member photos did better than without)

I believe myspace contains a large percentage of very young relationships and chaos, with music naturally playing to this young crowd.
There are some die-hards left but they are fading as myspace isn't cool anymore from what I hear from the teens around here.

Ken

I think the slow loading of the pages, terrible designs, and overall messy quality of the site had a big impact on its downfall.

The age group of the users is what really made it bad from a marketing stand point.

I have had a music band web site under myspace, and was very successful in my niche... selling good amounts of music and merchandising offline in stores as well as during shows. I have had over 35,000 hits on myspace and only 3 sales. The main problem was that these kids do not have credit cards, and once online feel entitled to everything. I had at least 10 people message me if I would send them a link to my album for free so that they could download it instead.

That's just my take on that website,

Tom

I was on Friendster and then all my friend jumped ship to Myspace - at the time Myspace was seen as great because you could add people you didn't know (from memory on Friendster you could only add someone who knew someone you knew or something)

At the time it seemed so great that you could add anyone and also customize your own page.

In fact I read somewhere that when News Corp looked into buying myspace they were horrified at all the crappy 14 yo amatuer html pages where as the owners sold them that was the great thing about myspace the customization.

Then they created dedicated band pages

So their original selling points became their downfall , easy to add strangers, horrible crappy custom pages and getting spammed by 1,000,00 bands every time you logged on

As impossible as it seems one day the same fate will happen to twitter and facebook and we will look back and go "I can't believe I used to be on facebook every day" LOL