News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller sat down with Fox Business in a video interview from a tech conference, and talked about MySpace’s future, among other things. The interview can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFesfYWo5GMMiller talks about how the company plans to shift the social network into more of an entertainment portal as Facebook has become quite a fierce competitor in terms of social communication on the web. Not that MySpace is abandoning that, but they are looking to get into more areas of entertainment, and according to Miller, part of this strategy will be offering some kind of gaming portal, where users can go and discover new games, and find people to play with. He makes it clear that he is talking about video games and not gambling.
He says MySpace needs to get back to being involved with more aspects of popular culture, and needs to be cleaned up to provide a fast and clean user experience. This is probably a good idea, because usually when people complain about MySpace (at least in my experience), it is about sloppy and unattractive profile pages.
Miller didn’t exactly say they were abandoning this either, and in fact, MySpace has acknowledged in the past that they pride themselves on the free expression aspect of the MySpace profile page, but anything they can do to deliver a cleaner experience should work in the site’s favor.
The gaming aspect could be a key to MySpace’s success though. Look at how much time people spend messing around with Facebook apps. If MySpace can generate some interest from solid games, it could be quite a big draw for many people. Miller notes that the three biggest activities online are communicating, search, and gaming.
Miller suggests that MySpace’s monetization in the future will be primarily ad-supported, and he says that there is a major migration of ad dollars to the web. He says the more rich media there is online, the more ad dollars will follow. MySpace plans to remain a major player.
