Around the Net
How MySpace Got Its Growth Back
- The New York Times, Monday, February 13, 2012 12:06 PM
We’d compare MySpace to a cat, but even felines only have nine lives. Far more resilient, the once reigning social network is still scratching, and actually growing at a respectable rate. Since December, in fact -- when MySpace introduced a new music player -- the site says it has signed up 1 million new users.
“When MySpace changed ownership last June, it was in free fall,” The New York Times remembers. Now, according to new comScore data, monthly traffic on MySpace rose in January, the first increase in almost a year. “At 25.1 million, it was an improvement of 4 percent from the month before,” NYT notes. “But it was still down almost a quarter from when the Vanderhooks bought MySpace with the singer and actor Justin Timberlake.” (At its peak in 2008, MySpace was attracting 75.9 million unique visitors a month.)
“We went from zero signups per day to 40,000,” said Chris Vanderhook, the company’s chief operating officer. Ironically, Vanderhook attributes MySpace’s rebirth to its integration with Facebook and Twitter, as well as the size of its music library. Since it still has full licensing deals with thousands of record labels, as well as songs from untold numbers of unsigned acts, MySpace has a library of 42 million tracks, several times more than Spotify or Rhapsody, NYT reports.
