MySpace: Rupert Murdoch’s Folly

2:05 pm EST December 5th, 2009 | Media | 5 Comments

What happens when luddites try to run web properties.

Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. ‘It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,’ explains another former executive. ‘There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.’

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5 Responses to “MySpace: Rupert Murdoch’s Folly”

  1. Chris K. says:
    December 5, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    It was more than just AJAX that killed MySpace.

    The single biggest thing that killed MySpace is giving users TOO much control of their pages, You would visit some peoples pages and they had 8 songs and videos playing at once on some crazy shaggadelic background with a million photos.

    Facebook was, and still is to an extent, clean and polished. You can add things but they all had a consistant look and feel. Easier to navigate for most people and hence easier to use.

  2. bryan says:
    December 5, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    I stopped going to Myspace because it was full of pop-ups and viruses.

  3. MadDog says:
    December 5, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    Second that. Most MySpace pages that I visited were hideous visual abortions that made your eyes bleed and your CPU weep.
    Murdoch and his hideous offspring are Devil spawn and when their entire commercial cesspool just implodes under the weight of greed and idiocy then the world will be a slightly better place.

  4. jr says:
    December 5, 2009 at 3:35 pm

    Myspace in 2009 is slower than Prodigy in 1994

  5. Matt Osborne says:
    December 5, 2009 at 9:26 pm

    MySpazz? I had almost forgotten that piece of shit existed.