Update: 4 Reasons Owen Took On MySpace And How He Can Save It

• MySpace’s newly appointed CEO Owen Van Natta officially took over as CEO of MySpace today. He sits at the bottom of a gigantic traffic slope that is Facebook. On a global basis, Facebook attracted more than twice as many visitors in the month of March as arch-rival MySpace.
• Facebook had an estimated 294.7 million unique visitors in March, 2009 on a worldwide basis, compared to 125.7 million for MySpace. Facebook gained 19 million visitors during the month, while MySpace gained only 2 million. Pageviews for MySpace have seen a drop of 20 percent since January (to 37.9 billion). Facebook has seen growth of 22 percent in pageviews to 87.3 billion (Schonfeld, TechCrunch)
• There are a few things going for MySpace, which caused Owen to take on the task. First, they are still the dominant social network in the US (although not for too much longer). One of Facebook’s problems is their surging amount of international traffic, which is notiously difficult to monetize. Being the top social network in the US is the best market for advertisers (let the internationals go to Facebook, they aren’t worth the bandwidth). Second, MySpace does still dominate the social music scene, and by now they are honing in on more than 10 billion song streams under the new MySpace Music. They are making money with nearly every stream, the one business model Facebook is still envious of MySpace for. Third, MySpace is said to bring in more than double the amount of revenue than Facebook. With MySpace Music included, revenue should be close to $1 billion this year, even in the down economy. Fourth, being the former COO of Facebook, Owen knows the weaknesses of his new rival’s organization. This can play to his advantage.
• His biggest concern as CEO will be retaining his current member base (those already gone to Facebook aren’t coming back, ever). If I were CEO, I’d be looking to capture the youngest possible audience to adopt MySpace before they get their hands on the vastly superior Facebook user experience. There is no way around it, MySpace is the new PC, you must get to them young, or they will go to the dark side (or the bright side?), Facebook (Apple). I would also try to strike deals with hardware manufacturers such as HP, Dell, etc. Just as Yahoo and MSN try to get their homepage/search engines as the default, going through the setup process to boot up your new machine should include an auto MySpace profile (unless of course you already have a profile). This could guarantee an extra couple hundred million potential members per year that may adopt the service or at least try it out. All acts of desperation. If you were CEO, what would you do to save MySpace from the abyss?

Update: Former MySpace chariman Rich Rosenblatt weighs in on what he would do to save the company.

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Tagged as: how to save myspace, Owen Van Natta