MySpace owners Specific Media and Justin Timberlake unveil new strategy

Following Specific Media’s surprise acquisition of MySpace earlier this year along with investor Justin Timberlake the company finally announced what its plans for the former social networking giant are.

The announcement of the new strategy took place this week in New York at the annual marketing and communications conference, Advertising Week. Company executives, though, are reported to be against characterising it as an “announcement”

According to tech analysis website, All Things D, MySpace will be looking to further focus on becoming the “#1 online community music destination.” This, All Things D reported, is to be the company’s new vision.

Its mission will be “to feed the energy of youth culture everywhere”.

In a presentation leaked before the announcement titled, “Myspace: The Next Chapter” the ailing social network charts its history.

The document is unflinching in its assessment with a timeline beginning in 2005 when NewsCorp acquired Myspace for US$581-million. It writes that “the Myspace audience is as large today as it was in 2005” but also recognises its failures saying that in 2006 Myspace shifted strategy away from its music roots to social but failed “to build [a] well-functioning social product”.

The document, however, also claims that video consumption on Myspace “has doubled in the last 30 days” and that there has been “increased homepage usage and music consumption”.

The Los Angeles Times in its reports on the “splashy promotional affair,” quotes Specific Media and MySpace CEO Tim Vanderhook as saying, “The great thing is pretty much everybody knows about Myspace, but the favourable opinion of Myspace has fallen off”.

According to the LA Times “social media experts” were sceptical that the social network could make a come-back, with one saying “I’ve been working in online since 1994, and there’s no such thing as a comeback… There are reconstitutions, there are name changes, there are strategic shifts. But in terms of somebody essentially committing user-satisfaction suicide and somehow sewing their wound shut, it’s never happened”.