MySpace Still Reaches 50M People Each Month
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …
I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.
You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.
The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one.
Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity.
Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.
50M sounds like a vanity number of unique visitors.
Still a lot but not comparable (thus actionable or risky-to-destroy) to eg "50M active users"
(to be fair twitter/fb and co usually also communicate the unique visitors afair)
Digg did a redesign that was absolutely horrible and created a huge backlash. Because Digg did not create a backup/proper versioning, they couldn't go back to the old design, and people migrated to reddit. The rest, as they say, is history.
and yes, it's awesome. but god damn, it's hard - and at first very unthankful - work.
why? things are the way they are because they got the way they are.
i.e.: you wan't to do something something very sane, let's say you want that a link from the startpage links directly to another page instead of getting dragged over 16 (a real world example) redirects. oh yeah, and you have the full support by the CEO to do whatever is necessary.
now there are two possible scenarios:
a) the person / team who is responsible for the mess is still with the company. he/she will justify - with good, valid arguments - that each of these 16 redirects is necessary. this person has spent 10+ years to work with the company and was doing the best work he/she was able - under the circumstances (which were never easy) - to do. the reasoning of this person is flawless. he/she - the person which "owns" this technical part - will refuse to do it. threatens to leave the company if you do it - oh - and the CEO says that this person is "indispensable".
b) the person / team who was responsible for the mess is no longer with the company. nobody has a clue, nobody knows why it's in there and nobody knows what will happen. if you do it anyway a huge shitstorm will start where everybody is complaining about the "incompetent" consultant.
the easiest option is always not to do anything (also called "lets do something else"), but well - that's the losers way.
so what to do
I) always start with hard cold data (i.e.: perf stats, specs of how many redirect the different browsers follow, ..), because this is the best way to ->
II) get rid of personalities - technical owners are great during product development, are liability and burden during maintenance and restructuring.
III) make sure that everybody understands that things will get worse before they get better
IV) focus on execution (a.k.a. do it anway, no matter what)
V) be aware that - newly introduced - bugs that do not kill the company will not get fixed right away
VI) be aware that there will be major criticism - and a lot of pressure on the CEO
and well, this is only the process for the absolutely sane changes you want to introduce. lets imagine the process for stuff where there would be an actual need for discussion.
it's an awesome job, it's a horrible job, it called consulting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBJMq-isHU4#t=23
update: step LXVIII) take the blame, all of it, but never the praise
Little thought is given to efficiency or refactoring because the decision makers don't care about that. Everything eventually becomes about quick quarterly "wins" so that executive management can earn their bonuses. In practice this means if you can't plan, complete and show the project directly increased revenue or decreased expenses for that quarter it won't become a priority.
That is the wonderful shortsighted world of a one product company in decline :-)
Excite.com is still an approximately top 3,000 US site. As is MyWay.com, which is owned by the same parent as Excite, and looks like it hasn't seen a design update in a decade plus.
Lycos still gets a modest amount of traffic.
And Digg is still a roughly top 500 site in the US. I put them in the same zombie-former-big-web-brand category as those other sites.
* or used to be? I haven't checked it in ~1 year
Is it a great product? An innovative product? I don't think so, every time I visit digg it comes across as just another aggregator, and there isn't much special about that.
Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store.
If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.
EDIT: was "1/270 of Facebook's monthly users", now corrected.
So that is actually a hell of a lot better than the headline leads you to believe. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population that - according to the article - checked in on Myspace last November.
Yes, I also find that hard to believe.
That's about 1/6th of the entire US population
It baffles me every time when Americans think that the world stops at their borders.
What makes you think all these people are Americans? We're talking a 120th of the world's population, what do you find hard to believe?
I read this as implying their uniques (as measured by, say, Google Analytics) were 50.6 million in the US, which probably means less than 50.6 million Americans visited the site in Nov. For instance, if every one of those uniques visited on both their smart phone and their computer, then it'd actually be 25 million real people. The truth is likely somewhere between 25 and 50 million Americans visited in Nov.
OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.
Their users stick to the platform no matter what. Why not give them some incentives and more flexibility?
Why don't they implement oauth, zot and tent et.al.?
I also feel like the 50M reach is probably disingenuously presented.
"It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media."
Friendster?
https://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/#.VLdTnWTF_lQ
About a YOY 50% decline rather than a 575% increase in November '14.
http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp...
Why these services still exist is beyond me. At best they are worthless, at worst they are fraudulent.
The other 100K are juggalos and pedophiles.