No, that's not a typo. Myspace.com is ranked inside the top 10 sites globally.
That's amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that we, and by "we" I mean most people reading this blog, had never heard of it until recently. Where did it come from?
If you go to MySpace, you will probably walk away with the impression that it is a joke... some kind of junkyard of personal pictures, blogs and random stuff clumsily plopped onto the Web. And, unless you are a studious observer of the Alexa Traffic Rankings, you would almost certainly walk away with the impression that it is no big shakes. But you would be dead-wrong.
So, how did MySpace get so popular? Kids. MySpace has tapped into a previously ignored market -- a market much more active than previously assumed. Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp must have run the numbers and saw a gold mine. They bought Myspace for $580 Million back in July of 2005.
I overheard somebody say that myspace.com actually has more page views per day than Google. I couldn't believe it. If that were the case, then myspace would have to be worth billions... with a "b". Turns out it wasn't true. A quick check of Alexa's PageViews graph comparing the two reveals that myspace gets a little more than 50% of the pageviews of Google.
PageViews Graph
I think the lesson here is not to discount the kids. They will become the prime Internet demographic in the years to come and they will determine what's hot and what's not. Just like with soda, music and movies, the marketing dollars are more interested in my kids than me... and judging from MySpace, the marketers may be right. The kids are a major force on the Web.
MySpace - myspace.com - site info
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