Chris DeWolfe It sounds crazy, but even in the first plan that I wrote up, I mentioned AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail, knowing we would be big. And it’s crazy to think that it happened.
We met about seven or eight years ago during the beginning of that Internet boom.
Tom has a million ideas, and some of them are pretty good. Some of them are a little wacky. But oh, this one was just a phenomenal idea.
It was pretty much a great way to work.
All these creative people became ambassadors for MySpace by using us as their de facto promotional platform. People like to talk about music, so the bands set up a natural environment to communicate.
We wanted to make sure we had a huge U.S. community right from the beginning. And it was always in our first business plans to expand it internationally.
We started the company around the time that a lot of other social networking companies were starting up. But we saw that a lot of those companies had a very niche focus. We set out to create this next generation portal where we looked at the best social features around.
We get criticized by all the bloggers for the poor design of MySpace. But it’s worked out well. We intentionally kept it very simple.
We looked at how people live their lives. We didn’t get bogged down in creating the next new technology podcasting RSS thingamajiggy.
We had classifieds, events, blogs, music. It definitely has its own voice. It’s a little bit edgy, it seems cool, it doesn’t seem overly produced.
We’re not deciding what’s cool. Our users are. MySpace is all about letting people be what they want to be.
My vision for social networks is participatory, visual, based on dialogue. They can be as edgy as they want or as square as they want – it’s up to them.
As a TV manager, the best thing to happen is your show gets really hot. But you always know that it's going to lose popularity and become uncool at some point when you run out of ideas or people just get tired. We don't have to deal with that because we are not creating the program – our users are. They can continually reinvent what's new and what's cool, based on changing their profiles, or new bands coming in.
There are 140 million different channels to watch on our site.
They're defining the experience, not us. We're just letting it rip. What I'm basically trying to say is that as long as we don't screw it up, we'll be fine.
We’re never arrogant, we're always looking at the competition. But they have not been successful for a couple of reasons. The intent to socialize on a site like Yahoo! isn't really there because the brand doesn't necessarily stand for anything and there's no real voice to it.
A lot of people feel that those sites were much bigger than they were. Friendster had 1.5 million users. Last month in the US we had 54 million unique users. A lot of people have put their lives online and are using MySpace to manage their social lives. There was definitely a concern in the beginning that that could happen but if you have 100 friends and 99 of them are on MySpace you can't just go over to another website and expect them all to follow.
We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of where we can go. We plan to move into another 10 or 11 territories in the next year.
The social platform is multi-local, not multinational. There are important local customs, such as the buying of gifts in Cyworld in Korea. MySpace is already localized in 18 countries. There will only be a few social networks in each country. We localize our product when we go into a new market.
We recognize that there are big differences in culture in all countries. For example, in Japan, they seem to be very interested in blogging in groups and sharing information by affinity groups, whereas in the U.S. it's more about the individual person and the friends that are around them.
In every country we have a local management team on the ground that really understands the culture and customs and how people use the site. We just did that in January of this year, and our unique users have increased by 50 per cent.
In the early days, there were a lot of bands signing up. They told us that they’d like to post their lyrics and tour dates. Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it.
It gives those artists a longer period of time to develop themselves before they get signed, or make a living without getting signed at all.
We’re always looking for the right opportunities.
It's not only the banner ads. We allow advertisers to set up their own profiles and build a community around their brand. You can become a friend of Toyota or a new movie exactly the same way you become a friend of a real person on MySpace. That's incredibly successful. We work with all the top brands in the world.
As PR counselors we need to persuade companies to let go, to give up control of the message; to learn from consumers who want to co-create the brand.
We were resolute to do what our users wanted. Having discipline and saying no is why we ended up being so successful.
It’s important to be very disciplined in terms of not listening to them.
For the most part everyone doubted we were a real company and a real site because we weren't in the Silicon Valley. And we didn't do things like everyone else. We had ten different features on our site. They considered that to be unfocused. The user interface wasn't pretty. We weren't using Linux operating system but off-the-shelf Microsoft products, which was unheard of.
Others try to do too many things at one given time. At any one time, we focus our developers on the top three to four initiatives and don’t get distracted with what others tell us we ought to do.
That was the antithesis of what we aimed to do. Most of the sites that did that became boring after awhile.
Continuity with senior management is very important. It’s been one of the reasons why we’ve won.
It's certainly nice to make money off of it and become financially successful, but really the fun of it was to build the site and that continues to be the fun of it.
Once you choose your product road map, then it becomes very important to focus on the top three to four initiatives and get those things done.
Tom Anderson Chris kind of rescued me and pulled me into his department, and said, ‘Don’t leave.’ And that’s sort of where we started out.
At a basic level, it’s just like e-mail on steroids or something. You can find everybody, and it’s got pictures, and you can talk to a bunch of people at once. It's cool.
We started our first company nine moths later. So I went from not working or doing little side jobs here and there to helping to run a company and own part of it. I don’t think that a normal business guy would have given me this kind of chance.
I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster, and I thought, ‘They’re thinking way too small.’
Things did go remarkably easy for us. I can’t say we struggled for a long time; we only struggled for a month.
In a way, it’s our lack of experience that helps.
This may not work out.
We this huge spike because of people telling each other. It just went crazy from there. We didn’t have this big, long struggle behind it. We put it up, and it got popular very quickly.
They had no room for fakesters. If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us? People said, ‘I’m going to go to MySpace because I can do what I want there.’
We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn’t stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace. Some people have fun with it, and others try to get more business and sell stuff, like a makeup artist or a band, and we encourage them to do that.
Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. That’s how we do a lot of our updates. We catalog what people tell us that they want. It’s not super-complicated.
We didn’t do traditional marketing, but we did try to find photographers and creative people because we thought that would make the site more interesting.
That made for an interesting community, and brought in a lot of people.
So we are not doing what everyone else is doing. When we were getting popular, people were saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing this or that?’ I thought they were ridiculous, and they thought I was ridiculous.
I’d like to do this as long as it’s fun, and that could be a long, long time.
A lot of the early growth had to do with the features and what our competitors were not allowing people to do.
As long as it’s still fun to be here we are going to continue our work. For me it feels like the opportunity has just begun; it’s definitely not ending.
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