A New Search for MySpace

garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide the popular social networking site with a new search engine. From the article: 'Search is a driver of traffic and advertising revenue for other major Web destinations, but it's a largely untapped source of growth for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties such as online gaming site IGN and sports site Scout. Given MySpace's power, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are expected to compete fiercely for the right to be the search engine of choice for MySpace and the rest of Fox Interactive. News Corp. won't say how much money it expects to derive from a deal, but industry experts say it could conceivably boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.'"

Comments

Re:Quality or quantity?

[geddes]

If you think teenagers have little buying power you are crazy. Parents buy so much crap for their kids these days. The First result for 'teen market' in google says:

1. Teens (13-19) spend $94.7 billion per year, $3,309 per person.
2. 37 percent of teens' income comes from parents, the rest from jobs.
3. Online spending projections show teen expenditures are on the rise:
   o 2003: $1.7 billion
   o 2004: $2.6 billion
   o 2005: $3.6 billion
   o 2006: $4.8 billion
   

It's not a small market. When teens get jobs, more often than not what they earn is 100% discretionary, they aren't paying rent or buying their own food. I think it is unfortunate that teen culture is so consumption-driven, but that is the way it is.

Re:Sexual Predators

[Golias]

Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators

Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?

Better stay away from the shopping malls too.

MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision. If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex. The "real world" outside is vastly more dangerous for children than any social web network.

Re:Non-structural markup

[Golias]

MySpace text is black on white by default. If it's hard to read, it's because the teenybopper who customized her site chose to make it that way.

Bad markup under the hood is a more valid criticism of MySpace pages, but we're not talking about building the next Amazon.com here. We're talking about a service that provides quick-and-dirty tools for high school and college kids to slap together collections of their favorite pictures, links to videos on YouTube, rants about their favorite bands/movies/whatever, and also allows public & private messages, blogging, etc.

In other words, in spite of the ugliness, it pretty much allows anybody who wants it to be their own old-school BBS Sysop.

MySpace (along with LiveJournal, Xangxa, and a few others) are delivering exactly what the World Wide Web was originally promised to be: A place where everybody can be a content publisher. IMHO, People who whine about the broken HTML and/or the goofy choices some people make with their pages are losing sight of the Big Picture.