Causes is a social networking donation platform that uses MySpace so that people can raise money for causes or issues that they believe in. Generally these kinds of activities help provide a community around issues like Breast Cancer, or stop smoking, or other issues that are part of our daily life. Causes is an excellent application that makes the process of raising and donating money for a specific cause very easy and embeddable into someone’s MySpace page.
Last night according to ReadWriteWeb and Stanford Social Innovation Review, Causes has sent an e-mail out to all their MySpace members stating that they will be moving over to Facebook and no longer supporting MySpace. I do not see why they could not do both, but apparently Causes does not want to support both platforms. From a business viewpoint – Causes would be very smart to provide support for both platforms; everyone needs a simple easy way to donate to the cause they believe in.
Stanford Social Innovation Review though also brings up the specter of money, in that it is well known that Facebook caters to a richer clientele than MySpace. Going out to Quanticast – the demographics for MySpace and Facebook makes this a compelling argument.
MySpace Demographics:
Facebook Demographics:
What is interesting about the Quanticast information is on the right side data pane where people who are likely to visit Facebook, Causes shows up as the number one entry in the likely to visit category.
Where on the likely to visit column causes does not even show up.
Demographics are also telling – people are much less likely to be college educated on MySpace, meaning they just simply do not make a lot of money. However, some research points out that poor people donate more overall money to causes that influence their groups or their interest groups than rich people do. The problem also might be in the micropayments processing side; small amounts of money usually are quickly degraded by mounting fees from payment processors, handling, and movement than larger payments, which is a definite possibility and, one of the drawbacks to the micropayment system.
What is sad though is that rather than supporting both platforms, which is just good business, Causes has decided to abandon MySpace in favor of Facebook. Regardless of the reason, from a business viewpoint you don’t abandon a channel until it stops being profitable, if Causes believes that MySpace is no longer profitable, then there is more here about the internal workings and visitor counts of MySpace than we generally have discussed in the blogging world, let alone the press.
Causes definitely needs to post a statement on their blog, so we know what the reason is, rather than speculating as to what the reasons are.
