Sweet Mother Of MySpace

I was settling into a long Air Canada flight from Montreal to Vancouver and all primed to read the cover story from BusinessWeek called, Beyond Blogs – What Business Needs To Know (June 2, 2008), when I came across a regular column called, Facetime, by Maria Bartiromo featuring Chris DeWolfe (the 42-year-old Chief Executive of the online social network, MySpace). You all know the drill: News Corp. snagged the MySpace guys for $580 million in 2005, and since then they’ve been fending off the comparisons to Facebook, etc…

There was one question that seemed kind of straight forward: "How have things changed since Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace?"

I was expecting some pap answer around how the company is still trying to figure out the fit, the monetization, etc… but check out DeWolfe’s answer:

"At the time that News Corp. bought us, we had somewhere around 22 million unique users. Now I think we’re close to 120 million unique users worldwide. Our site has also become less of a niche site, where in the early days it was the creative trendsetters that were really driving the growth — from musicians to artists to actors to comedians. Now it’s everybody. So the demographic has widened a great deal. Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S., believe it or not, are on MySpace. Twelve percent of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace. Forty-five percent of all the users on MySpace are over the age of 35."

Stop the presses.

Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S. are on MySpace?

Bartiromo picks up on this stat and suggests that maybe it’s just paranoid parents creeping on their kids and DeWolfe shoots back:

"For the most part, they’re using the site for the same reason everyone else is: to socialize. If you look at the Internet generation, where it went mainstream was around 1995. So if you were 25 years old in 1995, you’re now 38, which would be right in the sweet spot of where a mother would be."

Wow.