MySpace Goes Mobile, Faces a New Challenger
PaidContent reports that a new social networking site for Teens called Tagged has received funding. Little is revealed about the business model, but it will be difficult for anyone entering the space to gain market share from MySpace.
The average age of MySpace users skews a bit older than a teenage user base (roughly 18), but it still has a great deal of users in their teens who aren't likely to abandon the accounts they have set up and developed (and made known to "friends" in the network). This gets to the stickiness of social networking, and the advantages of being first to market. Although this clearly didn't work for Friendster, a combination of features, differentiation (MySpace's focus on music) and marketing are clearly important in this space.
Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn, meanwhile, announced at the NATPE show in Las Vegas that this is the year MySpace will "go mobile."
"You can see [users] interacting on their computer now want to extend that to the phone. … We want to empower MySpace screen names to supplant mobile numbers," he said.
How this will be done isn't exactly clear. It could require hardware partnerships as well as carrier partnerships. It could be complicated. But all that aside, it could be a very powerful integration, given that the MySpace demographic also represents a large market of mobile users.
More importantly, they are also an attractive demographic for advertisers, especially when mobile and inclined to transact locally. Bring in the possibility of contextual and geotargeted advertising, and you start to get the picture. We'll have to wait and see what FIM has up its sleeve.
