Back in the day, we had that wonderful social media site that started this whole social internet frenzy. What was it called? Oh yeah . . . MySpace.
The site was great until the release of Facebook, which reinforced the concept and attracted more users. One would assume that Facebook's dominance in the market would have caused MySpace to shut down. However, you'd be wrong. The site is still up and running. In fact, the site had more than 50 million visits last November.
MySpace has maintained enough traffic to make it viable, The Wall Street Journal reported. The site was bought out by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in 2005. After the social media site's value had diminished, Murdoch chose to sell it to Specific Media, a marketing company, in 2011.
However, Murdoch may regret that. According to Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook, the site is doing quite well.
"MySpace has managed to attract a vibrant audience of 17 to 25-year-olds, particularly music and entertainment fans," Vanderhook said.
The site also went through a major redesign, with a stronger focus on music and bands over individual users. However, the individual accounts are still there. On top of that, users keep coming back to the site for old data and photos. The most notable example of this is the prominence of #tbt, or "Throwback Thursday" on Instagram and Twitter. Users who want to share pictures of their younger selves turn to their old MySpace accounts to find their pictures.
What does Vanderhook and Specific Media want to do with all of that MySpace data? Turns out that he wants to use it to sell marketing information. Vanderhook told WSJ that he could combine MySpace's collection of registered accounts with something called the "Advertising Cloud."
The MySpace data would be collected in one spot, anonymized and then used in combination with in-store data. Vanderhook believes that this combination could help advertisers understand the relationship between online ads and real world sales.
So, don't feel guilty about your old MySpace account. You can still put it to good use. If you have issues with a company using your (anonymized) data to help companies sell more products, then, it may be time to delete your account.
