The Crash of Civilisations: The Digital Rust-Belt

Sulphur gas lays ankle deep, dressing the town square like a morbid magic show. The once distant echoes of cannon fire are now a persistent percussion movement, with undertones of service boots scrambling across broken glass and through shallow puddles. All the while, townsfolk play their games and make light of an abominable situation.

MySpace 2010 and the fight for survival.

The final Google ‘mortgage’ payment to MySpace is scheduled  for June 2010; US$75m out of a US$900m deal, and the last serious money left in the forecast.

Arguably, this advertising agreement has been the only reason News Corp has persisted with propping up MySpace for so long, leaving the future of the social media behemoth in serious question post-contract.  How did we get to this point? 70 million world citizens zipping to and from the mothership, yet no value creation? Actually, there’s plenty of value, its just all subjective and personal, not objective and commercial.  

For all its sordid, trivial and intensely personal streams of consciousness, social media (collectively) is a much loved shanty town. Yet, it groans under the weight of rubbish, clutter and poor (and poorly designed) infrastructure. The land lords are going broke anyway, but the cash drain is accentuated by the increasing disengagement of residents.

In April 2008, for example, almost 42% of Facebook visitors also associated themselves with MySpace. In November that same year, that figure slipped to 35%. As of April 2009, just 28% of Facebook users had any association with MySpace (Source: Nielsen Online). This rapid decline in shared audiences between the two has resulted from a massive drop in the monthly MySpace audience and the rapid growth in FaceBook numbers. 

In fact since April 2008, Facebook’s monthly AU audience has grown 80%, to more than 4.7m UAs, compared with a 26% decline in monthly UAs for MySpace over the same period to 1.9m. There is an indisputable trend downwards for the once Golden Child of the News Corp empire; a hard lesson which will be taught to every social media poster child - without an objective value, implicitly agreed to by end-users, social media business models have no longevity (or saviour), save for a quick buy-out devoid of due diligence.

Given the diabolical commercial nature of social media, a more interesting philosophical question in this period of bank and automotive nationalisation, would be to ask: should governments (and which governments?) step in and financially support a social media entity - arguably providing an important personal service to hundreds of millions of citizens - if it threatens to file for Chapter 11? And if bankruptcy is the result, what’s the fate of the Terrabytes of data sitting on servers in the rusting warehouses of Cleveland, Oxford and New York?