Internet

Rupert Murdoch’s cool new thing

Edie G. Lush

24 June 2006

Edie G. Lush says that MySpace, the online social network, is another money-spinner for the great media mogul

It’s easy to see why the 16–34-year-old crowd targeted by MySpace are liable to flee as soon as something cooler comes along. Competition in the social networking arena is fierce — Buzznet, Facebook, Xanga, TagWorld, and Friendsorenemies are just a few of the challengers. Many users have homepages on two or three websites and flit between them all. But arguing about which is the hippest site on the web is rather missing the point. MySpace is one of a handful of companies now redefining the way we communicate. Look at who else is sucked into its vortex — more than a million bands have pages on the site. Users can hear and download songs from both signed and unsigned bands and check out forthcoming gigs. The Arctic Monkeys’ rapid rise from unknown to number one in the charts is well documented. They owe much to fans on MySpace sharing Arctic Monkey songs by providing links on their homepages, and sending those links to their friends.

Murdoch used MySpace recently to market the product of another arm of his group NewsCorp, Twentieth Century Fox. To publicise its film X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox launched an X-Men page on MySpace, allowing users to host the X-Men trailer on their own website and list a favourite X-Man as a ‘friend’ on their pages. Nearly a million MySpace users had a link to the X-Men page on their own profile page, and the hype thus created helped X-Men to breaking box office records. It was the biggest holiday weekend movie release ever, banking $123 million in its first four days.

All this is creating new optimism in the media industry. In a world in which we spend increasing amounts of time surfing the internet, often downloading illegal video content, media moguls have been worried that their staple box-office and television advertising revenues were draining away. Fox’s clever marketing of X-Men proves that this is not necessarily the case.

You don’t have to look far to spot other potential synergies for Fox and MySpace. ITV’s £175 million purchase of Friends Reunited — the hugely successful website through which users trace old school friends — has given birth to a television show on the digital channel ITV Play where friends brought together via the website answer trivia questions about a year when they were together at school. Interestingly, it is the first ITV channel not to be funded by advertising, but instead by revenue from phone and text charges.

NBC Universal’s $600 million purchase of iVillage Inc, the top US women’s community website, offers similar possibilities. NBC is examining the idea of ‘recycling’ news and entertainment programming from top-rated daytime shows such as Today onto iVillage’s site — and providing alternative endings to popular shows and pairing these items with specific advertising.