Canadians Overpay On Copying Levy -- Money 'Reimbursed' To Industry

Plenty Of Space At MySpace News

from the The-MySpace-News-Blues dept

Tue, May 15th 2007 4:40pm — Joseph Weisenthal

The success of Digg has prompted a lot of copycat attempts, such as the revamped Netscape, which took a lot of flack at the time the site was launched. Since then, however, the model has been replicated so many times that nobody even bother to notice. Last month, MySpace launched its own Digg clone in the hopes that its users would be interested in social news the same way they're interested in social networking. Turns out, things don't translate so well. As Mike Arrington points out, MySpace News is a bit of a ghost town, as stories can rise to the top with just one or two votes. Although the site is young, it seems that MySpace users are much more interested in discovering bands and people to date than they are discussing the news. The point is that even if a company has a lot of users, there's no surefire way of building a certain kind of community or getting them to use a site in a specific way.

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Charles Griswold, 15 May 2007 @ 4:47pm

If MySpace had instead launched a Digg-style site that catered to the sorts of things that interest the typical MySpace user (music, entertainment, MySpace pages, etc.) it probably would have been more successful.
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Spud, 15 May 2007 @ 5:48pm

This article hits the nail on the head. I really don’t think MySpace users are interested in reading the news while they are at MySpace. They are there for other reasons such as the music and there friends. I’m sure MySpace users actually want to escape the “real world” news so they won’t go looking for it while at MySpace. I can see MySpace news dieing eventually.
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nonuser, 15 May 2007 @ 5:49pm

Ries & Trout
This phenomenom was explained well by Ries & Trout in their book "Positioning", published decades ago. Consumers learn to associate a product category with one or two market leaders, which is great for those businesses, but there's a catch... the same mental inertia that protects them from being easily dislodged by competitors also prevents them from moving into a much different space and dominating that as well.
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Chris, 15 May 2007 @ 6:15pm

probably doesnt help..
...that the average age of myspace users is 14. Not like they really give a damn about whats going on in the real world.
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pete, 15 May 2007 @ 6:42pm

hah!
What are you talking about? 14-year olds are just as active in today's news as adults. In fact, little Suzy down the road just sold some of her stocks because she fears recession; at least in her mind, with the money she'll make now, she can still afford the HCl Swimming Barbie AND Tae Kwon Do Barbie with karate slapping action.

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Mich4elm4n, 16 May 2007 @ 1:03am

"even if a company has a lot of users, there's no
"even if a company has a lot of users, there's no surefire way of building a certain kind of community or getting them to use a site in a specific way." so does myspace.
_______________________
http://www.vdownload.org/
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monica, 22 May 2007 @ 8:20am

tomycptrkrashtonush
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