Will the MySpace redesign really make a difference?
June 17, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
MySpace is trotting out a fancy new site redesign beginning tomorrow, in an effort to be more attractive to advertisers. The redesign, to be finished by early fall, will include a new navigation bar, search tool and video player.
I’ve read that the redesign is intended to address one of the main problems of social networking sites, which, as the New York Times recently put it, is that many user pages have the aesthetic appeal of a 14-year-old’s high-school locker. But there are still many questions left about the advertising value of social networks. [article]
There’s a lot of discussion going on, partially sparked by the MySpace announcement of striving towards monetization, that there’s really no viable business model for social networks.
Facebook hasn’t figured it out yet, and royally screwed up its try with Beacon. Twitter doesn’t have a business model yet. Ning has hundreds of thousands of visitors, but still runs Google AdSense ads.
Maybe the most popular social networks are the ones that just …don’t ever monetize? I have no idea how the heck that would actually WORK but I also have no idea what the business model is.
Does the redesign affect MySpace’s monetization model at all?
Here are some of my thoughts on the redesign from a user experience perspective: http://tinyurl.com/3elfrs
It depends. If MySpace is doing this based on user input, it will help with loyalty of their user base. If they are doing it so folks like me stop ranting about how gawd-awful their user pages look? It’s a waste of cash. You could even argue that, for the uninitiated it helped differentiate MySpace.