Categories: Articles

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.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.