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A brief look at the success of MySpace and YouTube

MySpace made news back in July 2005 when it was purchased for a cool US$580M by News Corp. YouTube eclipsed this in October last year, handing ownership over to Google for US$1.65B. The sites are ranked 4th and 5th in terms of popularity just under the top 3 search engines, with about 15% of all internet users viewing the sites daily. MySpace hit the news again in August, signing a US$900M deal that will secure Google the privilege of providing the search engine used across the site.

MySpace gives every person in the world a little piece of the internet to call their own. By signing up you can easily start telling the world about yourself, uploading photos and posting messages on other people's pages. It sounds rather simplistic; however it has proven extremely popular.   There are over 106 Million accounts registered on MySpace, with a reported rate of 230,000 new accounts being registered every day.

YouTube utilises some fancy Flash technologies to allow you to watch and share videos. It is a relative newcomer to the web, starting out in late 2005; however it boasts over 100 million video clip downloads and 65,000 new clips added daily.

As is often the case with new media, YouTube had a few contentious problems it needed to straighten out, mostly with the ownership of the content being served. One of the clips that helped make the site famous, Lazy Sunday from Saturday Night Live, was the first to disappear from the site after the content owner NBC demanded all their content be pulled from the site. However, this changed rapidly as many content owners began to realise the potential in this new technology and NBC started to use YouTube more as a marketing tool, allowing several clips to continue to be shown. Warner Music has also struck a deal that will see all of its music videos freely available on YouTube.

Content ownership was not the only issue; YouTube is reportedly blocked in Turkey due to the escalation of a “virtual war” between Greeks, Armenians, Kurds and Turks, with people on each side posting insulting and harassing movies. Thailand has also blocked the site on a few occasions for various reasons including the availability of movies insulting the King.

MySpace has also had its fair share of headaches, with a security flaw allowing hackers to modify other users' profiles as desired. This usually resulted in an attempt to get other users to enter their details into a fake login field on a compromised profile page. These details are then recorded by the attacker for bulk posting of spam messages.

There are also legitimate concerns over the safety of children who use the site with a number of online predators using the service. While there are steps in place to ensure all profiles owned by minors are private, these restrictions are commonly bypassed by children entering false ages.

The two websites have also butted heads over the use of video. YouTube created a service that allowed you to embed videos on your websites through some JavaScript. A number of MySpace profiles started using this tool by embedding videos on their profile pages. MySpace, concerned with losing user browse time, responded by blocking all YouTube videos and creating their own video service.

One thing the two sites have in common is that they are both popular tools for the distribution of viral marketing. A number of highly rated and humorous videos have actually been skilfully created by advertising agencies and posted on YouTube. These can be identified by looking for web addresses or catch phrases towards the end of the video. The idea is people will see them and send them to friends and family, resulting in massive exposure through word of mouth. There are already a large number of online addresses available from 2008 US Presidential Candidates!

MySpace allows companies to have profiles that are dedicated to a specific product and this is becoming preferable to dedicated websites from a marketing perspective. For example, there is a MySpace page for the Spiderman computer game, with a huge number of friends and comments posted by other users. This allows the company to capitalise on the social networking side of MySpace to give their product more exposure.

It will be interesting to see how these two giants of the internet mature and develop over the next few years and how they will come to terms with the copyright and privacy concerns. One thing we can be sure of is that these two companies will have a large hand in shaping the way we use the internet in future.