MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe spoke with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on stage at the TechCrunch 50 Conference, and two really interesting nuggets came out of the conversation.
First off, DeWolfe told Arrington that 95% of Ad Revenues come from only 9 different countries. He did not elaborate much, or go into exactly what countries these were, but he did say:
Our international strategy is different than our competitors. We look at advertising dollars, and 95% of all advertising revenues come form 9 countries.
In those countries, we have 30% more unique users than our closest competitor in those 9 countries. So that is really our strategy.
There has been a fair amount of speculation as to just which countries make up this list of nine, but it is just that – speculation. TechCrunch’s own Schonfeld suggests that U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, France, and Canada would be included. Profy.com goes so far as to graph out the regional interest in MySpace, and suggests that it might be close with some minor rearrangements. “In the regional interest chart France is actually on the 10th position but I could easily replace Dominical [sic] Republic or Jamaica on the list with France, I think,” says Profy’s Svetlana Gladkova.
Regardless of which countries actually make up the list, it is astounding that such a large percentage of ad revenue comes from such a small number of countries. It is also an interesting look into MySpace’s own strategy.
The second piece of news that DeWolfe dropped is that MySpace has an upcoming Google Gears project that will allow users to integrate their MySpace profiles with their desktop. This is not the first time MySpace has been involved with Google Gears. They have also used the service for desktop Instant Messaging. Of the new profiles project, DeWolfe says, “You will be able to archive it in a timeline, or create a scrapbook of all your profiles.” For those of you unfamiliar with Google Gears:
DeWolfe also noted in the interview that MySpace Music (set to launch this month) is currently being managed by himself and MySpace COO Amit Kapur as the company looks for a CEO for that business (which itself consists of 70 employees). Myspace has excelled in the musical part of social networking thus far, and the launch of MySpace Music could be a big boost in the ongoing competition with Facebook.
