Is MySpace a Social Network?

MySpace is the largest social network in the world, with more than 122 million members. However, the company does not necessarily want to be known as king of the social networks.

As some industry observers— including some at eMarketer—have questioned social media’s financial prospects, it is enlightening to note that even the top company in the space sees the term as potentially confining.

In a briefing with eMarketer, MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe put it this way: “From the very beginning, we’ve always said that we were a next-generation portal and that MySpace was all about people connecting over shared interests.”

Jeff Berman, the company’s president of sales and marketing, added, “The classic portal model is content-driven, and it’s top-down with a separate communications platform.

“We sit in a hybrid space. If you think about how others in the space are trying to define what they want to be, you hear more people talking about wanting to be the starting point on the Internet. Well, that’s what we are,” Mr. Berman continued.

This is not just a matter of semantics: Ad spending on social networks still represents a small fraction of total online ad spending—much less than the search and display ads of the largest portals.

courtesy: www.emarketer.com