Myspace launched a social news site last week that allows users to vote on stories and democratically determine popularity, much like Digg. I've spent some time getting a feel for how it works and my opinion is that the site, much like everything Myspace produces, is medicore at best. The interface is clunky and has a simple voting system that isn't particularly enticing; you vote on a 1 - 5 scale and it shows the number of votes and the average score. It does require you to actually view the submission in a frame before you can vote, however, so unlike Digg you can't blindly vote for something without actually reading it first. I submitted a few stories but from what I can tell they are moderated before being made live because I couldn't find them later. Oddly enough, the most popular story on myspace news right now is MySpace News is no Digg-killer, which doesn't seems like something they'd want to promote on the first week of launch.
The good news is that if you do get past the moderation process it currently only takes 2 votes to get something promoted to the homepage. That's your cue, SEOs.
So does Myspace have a shot at being the next big social news site? Absolutely. Myspace has the advantage of having a captive audience of millions of users whose attention they could easily divert to the myspace news site. If they simply added news headlines to the top of everyone's homepage, the sheer volume of people reading myspace news would more than make up for the fact that it's a mediocre product. Just because it's utter crap probably won't make a difference, Myspace itself is a good testament to that. If it does take off, I'm curious to see what getting on the myspace homepage will be like in the next year or two. Getting on the Digg homepage results in some pretty astounding traffic numbers, but imagine if you made the homepage of a social news site that wasn't just confined to the tech/geek crowd.
By: Oatmeal
Myspace's Digg Clone is ... Meh
Social Media
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
As far as I'm concerned, there is an absolute gold mine here. Myspace users might not be as interactive as the digg crowd...but I'd also bet that their core demographic is more easily influenced, and yet still just as likely to read interesting articles (as long as the content is properly targeted). Places like i-am-bored.com, ebaumsworld, maddox.xmission.com, and literally thousands of other VERY HIGH TRAFFIC sites cater to people who also use myspace heavily. If myspace news is to succeed, the content has to appeal to myspace users...so instead of apple articles, maybe articles like those featured on the aformentioned site would fair better (and would help build the popularity of the site as a hub for interesting information). In any case, there is an amazing opportunity for any seo to at the very least, get quite a bit of exposure. If your site could appeal at all to this type of crowed, you've got a great chance to get in on the ground floor and start determining what type of site news.myspace.com will eventually develop into.
I bet the clickthroughs would be WAY higher as well.
I agree with you Daniel, as I did on your youMoz post, not sure why no one else is seeing it for the opportunity it is. Any updates on your research? You haven't asked for the add yet...
This study by Compete (I've got no relationship with them) shows why I think this could be a great success.
We may all dislike MySpace for its bad design & the like, but people spend a huge amount of time on it. And as someone has already mentioned, the biggest demographic is now (or was in Aug 06) the 35+ age group.
If you can get content up on a site where people spend real time consuming information, and with a demographic which has spare time & cash, why wouldn't you?
I said the same on my publishing blog -- but I wonder if myspace users will even interact with it or if they'll stick to "me-focused" activities.
Myspace really need to go and hire a team of designers, make their site look nicer ;)
And they need to push a lot more people to the site - most frontpage articles have less than 3 votes........
Thanks for covering this, Matt. I honestly had heard nothing about this site until your post...and I actually do go on MySpace at least 2x a week. I've seen NOTHING about their news site. Like Jane, I couldn't find any links to it from the rest of the MySpace site. Your post piqued my curiosity, so I ran a Page Strength report to see if anyone is linking to it yet. So far:
So it looks like they already have some linkage. (I expected less.) Maybe they are waiting for more before they switch from beta to "live". I also wonder how many people are reading it right now. I'm curious as to how much impact it has if you get your site on the homepage? Guess we'll have to experiment and find out.
BTW, "Meh" really is a great word...it really expresses the point. :)
Count me among those encouraged by this foray. I've had a hard time trying to come up ways to make content appeal to the techy crowd for some very un-techy clients of mine. At least this site seems to have the possibility of appealing to a different audience, as DanielTynski pointed out.
Who knows how long the MySpace crowd will continue to hang out at MySpace, but if this become better integrated into the overall fabric of the site, I think it has great potential for the next wave of SMO.
Davidmihm, you and DanielTynski do make a good point. This is giving me new ideas for my non-techie sites. Trying to come up with content that techies would find interresting about my auto repair and automotive painting sites is almost impossible. This myspace news may be a start of something new. I guess we will all see what it becomes soon enough.
Anyone who writes articles catering to the core Myspace demographic (which in itself has many segments) should be salivating at getting 'MySpaced'.
Anyone who has a product or website that appeals to the core Myspace demographic should be busy learning the system and creating accessible content.
For example, the MySpace emo demographic would be all over an article like this: Tragic last words of MySpace suicide girls
The quality of discussion might be even worse than that on Digg, but who cares? Potentially direct access to your demographic of thousands if not millions?
I signed into MySpace (yeah, I have an account. But I don't like it :P) to take a look at the news site. I could have clicked on Matt's link, but I didn't -- I wanted to see how hard it was to find it by myself. It looks like they have not added a link to their news site in their navigation yet. Neither can I find a link to "news" or to anything similar on the home page, whether or not one is signed in.
Maybe when / if MySpace promotes the service, the community will start paying it some attention. Right now, it seems to be word-of-mouth alone that's promoting this thing.
Not linking to MySpaceNews in the main navigation makes no sense to me. It would seem like the most obvious way to promote the news site. It's hard to believe it's simply an oversight, but I can't think of one good reason not to link to MySpaceNews.
I can only imagine that they're planning on it in the near future, but the fact that they link to EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD (sorry to yell) on their home page makes me wonder why they aren't linking to their news site... Yet another MySpace enigma. Yet another.
I couldn't agree more. Maybe I was expecting too much out of myspace, but I'm unimpressed thus far.
Are your expectations high for myspace? I'm surprised I can even visit the site. I was expecting to click on a story and see "Your errors have been forwarded to myspace's technical group" or perhaps a swarm of submissions all about some hot nude pictures and ringtones.
You forgot the phishing pages that try and steal your password in order to fill your "friends' " comment walls with ads for webcams and hot designer handbags.
LOL. Dead on. :)
After deep reservations of the MySpace generation getting their collecitive american idol voteing mentality in the world i have to admit im impressed at the news stories.
No, im absolutely stunned. These are the current homepage articles:
Books? This is the generation of kids that are supposed to have replaced their bookshelves with playstaions and xboxes.
This looks like excellent editorializing to me, with exponentially higher quality than Digg.
Rupert old dude, please keep this up.
Exactly my though, I dought that myspace users will really know or care what this news site is about. Most users of myspace are teenagers and they are not the crowd that hangs out at Digg. I bet most users don't even know what Digg is.
I don't know, I think if I had myspace I'd come up with something better to use the traffic for.
Actually it's been reported for a few months that most MySpace users are now over the age of 35. The younger users may be more active on the site, but MySpace isn't quite as young as the perception.
I can believe this. From what I've seen of the social networking world, the younger users are gravitating to Bebo. 2001's 15 year old MySpace users are now 21, after all.
Matt good eye opener. This is the first time I hard any thing about this site. Personally I think it's to early to juge the out come of this site.
Only time will tell.
I think it looks and works crappy like everything on myspace. copys of sites are occuring more often. here in the netherlands we have a dutch variant of digg look at https://www.nujij.nl
Looks pretty ok but its not a new concept.
I think "meh" is an under statement. It's nothibng compelling, new, or any better than anything else out there on the internet. The only thing MySpace's new site has going for it is that it's hosted at MySpace.
Will adding "meh" to all my posts get me more geek love?
Oatmeal, you clearly know how to communicate with the snarky nerds that dominate the blogo-blog-o-mo-blog.
Perhaps a list of geek slang is in order? Could be solid linkbait...
Actually we'd considered doing something along those lines, never did it though :0
I thought "meh" was a pretty generic term?! But I do love the idea of the geek slang.
for sure my space, due to is't audience will be one of the next big things... and it is good that today you make the homepage with only a few votes...
MySpace is owned by Rupert Murcoch - News Corp. I doubt very much whether they would have embraked on a competitor to Digg without first doing some serious market research.
MySpace user demographic is totally different from Digg.com. While the latter promotes more technologically based and celebrity 'hit' news while the former creates an opportunity for more diverse subject matter catering to a more diverse, younger audience.
It's going to be a great oppotunity for SEOs to create link bait for that new demographic. And I bet it will take a while before the SEO-haters kick in - meh!