October 18, 2007 | Thursday
MySpace Platform announcement facing up to Facebook …Murdoch confident of $300m profit
By Matt Brocklehurst, Head of Marketing in Marketing
Yesterday evening (San Francisco time) the MySpace Platform was unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference.
The MySpace platform is basically a counter to the huge success of the Facebook Platform launched in May which enabled thousands of third party applications to be shared across friends.
The fact that the announcement came from Rupert Murdoch as well as Chris DeWolfe the co-founder of MySpace, is indicative of how important MySpace is to News Corp. Indeed Murdoch predicted up to a $300 million profit for MySpace in 2008, a significant contribution to the $5 billion ebitda for News Corp he expected (assuming the economy behaves itself).
Techcrunch provided a good summary of the key facts available at the moment on the MySpace platform:
• In the next couple of weeks MySpace will release a directory of existing third party widgets to help users find good content to add to their MySpace page.
• In the next month or two, MySpace will launch a proper platform… that will allow third party developers to create applications…Unlike existing widgets on MySpace, developers will be able to access deep profile and other information about users and bake it into the applications.
• Advertising can be included on the application pages (called control pages) and developers will keep 100% of the revenue. Ads may not be placed within widgets that appear on MySpace pages, however.
• Platform applications will not be available to all MySpace users right away. They’ll have a beta period that includes just 1-2 million MySpace users who’ll be able to access the applications. After a beta period applications will be available to all MySpace users.
It’s a pretty quick reaction from MySpace and a real indictor of how this competitive landscape is really hotting up. MySpace will be hoping to emulate the success of Facebook and by adopting a phased roll-out avoid some of the teething problems its competitor experienced.
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