I saw a link “from the blogosphere” on the BBC Technology news site about MySpace. In the article Henry Blodget mentions that analysts are predicting MySpace could be worth anything between $10B and $20B dollars within a few years.
MySpace contrinues to grow (well, lets say registered users) at a rate of something like 250,000 user day and is now something in the region of 50 million people ‘using’ the site per month. MySpace themselves claim to have 100 million registered users. So only about half are actively visiting the site. King Troll comments on the posting that this is a very high attrition rate.
MySpace and YouTube are just the latest incarnation of sites we’ve seen get meha-hyped the Web. Remember GeoCities? (was bought by Yahoo!), Tripod? (bought by Lycos), Homestead? (still appears to be independent). They didn’t have the same level of ‘marketing’ hype that press coverage that YouTube and MySpace do these day but they were certainly well talked about on the chat rooms of IRC, ICQ and Yahoo! chat. They were even talked about in the VIP !(Virtual Irish Pub) but I don’t suppose many people will remember that one.
It’s likely, according to some analysts, that YouTube and MySpace will just get sued out of existence. You only have to look at the P2P file sharing networks to see that is possible. However, because they are strictly web based, and by that I mean delivered through a browser, YouTube and myself are more approachable and usuable and marketable than the likes of eDonkey, eMule, Shareaza, BearShare et. al. The big sell is that this is ‘people’ generated content where the Intellectual Property rights rest with the inidividual in their own work (rather than YouTube, Ha!? It’s kinda like ‘All you face are belong to us’) The latest issue of Wired Magazine in it’s article ‘Music Reborn’ says that this is handing the power back to the bands and that listeners will benefit too. It’s endorsed by Beck who always had a view that Radio was crap, apparently. [Incidentely Wired Mag is quite a good read this month].
Web 2.0? Nah. [Aferall we all know that Sir Tim intended this all along. The W3C have had Amaya and Jigsaw for years. Yes I did try them way back, and yes they were rubbish. But the idea was there.]