Telstra launches social media hub
Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has become the most recent telco to launch a unified interface for social mobile, following Motorola’s Blur and HTC’s Sense.
Called Tribe, Telstra’s site lets mobile users update Twitter, MySpace and Facebook simultaneously.
To support the site’s launch, Telstra released figures showing that its five million mobile users were accessing Facebook via their phones 400 per cent more often than in April 2009. At the same time the number of users accessing Twitter had jumped 450 per cent.
“[Tribe] allows customers to manage their social profile from a single, easy-to-use portal that can be accessed from a range of Next G mobiles — not just smartphones,” Telstra’s executive director of mobility products, Ross Fielding, said.
“Best of all, data used to access the service is unmetered meaning most Tribe features are available at no cost to consumers.”
MySpace focusing heavily on social games
MySpace is seriously expanding its attention to social games, with Games replacing Apps as a tab in its main navigation bar. On her or his home page a user will now have a “Featured Games” window, where MySpace staff make game recommendations based on the interests of the user and his or her friends. Users will also have easy access to game updates, and will know when their friends score an app of up to five stars.
According to Inside Facebook (yes, Facebook covered this MySpace game upgrade quite fairly and thoroughly), 28 percent of MySpace’s 100 million monthly visitors use apps, and half of them play games. MySpace also recently announced Neon, its new IPhone app for games.
There’s much more about what MySpace is developing, including a screen shot of the new Games & Apps page, in this Inside Facebook post. Media groups should take note of the importance of games, and the huge audience they bring.
MySpace moves classifieds, goes more social
MySpace has moved its Oodle-powered classifieds into its Apps Gallery, making it possible for MySpace users to place the Oodle-built application on their personal home pages. It’s better positioning than where it used to be: nearly undetectable, tucked away in a sub-directory tree accessible from MySpace’s footer links.
Classifieds, along with other personal-use features, are being moved to personal-use applications, a strategy that seems to fit in with MySpace’s renewed emphasis on social networking around entertainment. The one-time leading social site’s traffic has been sinking fast against Facebook — off 20 percent since June. Focusing on entertainment — music, movies, games, live venues and the like — was something MySpace does better than its rival. It makes sense to emphasize your compentencies. Classifieds was never a core activity.
The move comes with some pluses and minuses. On the minus side, you might not know MySpace has classifieds unless you happened to be perusing the Apps Gallery or if one of your MySpace friends had the app loaded on her or his home page. On the plus side, you might be more interested in what your MySpace friend is selling or seeking than you would a total stranger. It’s precisely that social aspect of classifieds Oodle has been working to instill. It’s done so rather brilliantly on Facebook, and MySpace’s changes make it possible for Oodle to apply some of the Facebook functionality to its MySpace product.
So far, more than a half-million MySpace users have put the Oodle-powered classified app on their home pages. Only 64.5 million to go.
To find it on MySpace, from the top nav bar, pull down “More.” Click the “Apps Gallery” link. On the page that comes up, click the “Shopping” link in the left navigation rail. You’ll find the “Classifieds” app fourth from the top. Unfortunately, the default ranking on this page is “recently popular” rather than “most users.” There are more than 584,000 users of this app, and in round figures, about a half-million more than any other application in the category. Someday, MySpace will get it right.
The bookmark: www.classifieds.myspace.com still works, too.
News Corp reports loss – mostly due to MySpace
While News Corp. reported operating income of $3.6 billion for Q4 2009, the real news is how hard the media giant was hit by its MySpace downturn. The social media site recently laid off 700 and has replaced a founding executive with Owen Van Natta, the former CRO at rival Facebook. News Corp. acquired MySpace in 2005 for $580 million.
News Corp.’s current year revenues are $30 billion, an eight percent decrease from this time last year, although Cable Network Programming increased its revenue 32 percent. The Television segment of News Corp. suffered a whopping year-over-year income drop of 80 percent, while Newspapers and Information Services reported operating income of $96 million, far less than half that reported in 2008. Advertising revenue declined in all areas – the UK, Australia and Dow Jones in the U.S. The only two segments which actually reported a loss, howeer, were in Book Publishing by HarperCollins, and the Other category which included Fox Interactive Media and MySpace.
“The past year has been the most difficult in recent history, and our 2009 financial performance clearly reflects the weak environment that we confronted throughout the year,” said Chair and CEO Rupert Murdoch, on the earnings call. “We streamlined all our businesses and continue to do so, at the same time adjusting to the revolutionary changes taking place throughout the media industry.”
News Corp. reported a fourth quarter net loss of $203 million compared with net income of $1.1 billion in Q4 2008.
Here’s AIM Group’s latest coverage of the MySpace struggles.
MySpace continues to drop vs. Facebook growth
MySpace continues to drop in its war for supremacy with Facebook. Comscore results for March show that MySpace had 70 million monthly uniques in the U.S. in March. That’s less than it had a year ago. Meanwhile Facebook has surged to 61 million U.S. users and are adding a few million more every month.
Even worse for MySpace, its worldwide monthly page views have declined from 47.4 billion a year ago to 38 billion today. The impact is that advertisers will be less willing to spend the big bucks at MySpace. Over at Facebook, monthly page views grew from 44 to 87 billion vs. a year ago. (The numbers are similar in the U.S. with Facebook growing from 13 to 20 billion page views a month and MySpace dropping to 34.8 billion from 41.6 billion).
TechCrunch predicts that MySpace will be unprofitable within a year, decreasing from $800 million last year to less than half a billion within the next.
TechCrunch also reported that Facebook received and turned down a term sheet for a new $200 million venture round of funding that would value the company at $8 billion. Facebook’s last round valuation was $15 billion. The company is also suggesting that revenues will be $550 million in 2009 vs. previous estimates at $400 million and 2008 revenue of $280 million.
MySpace decline leads U.S. social media ad spend down
U.S. ad spending on social networks will fall 3 percent in 2009 to $1.14 billion in 2009, from $1.18 billion in 2008. That’s a significant turnaround from previous years. Spending grew an estimated 33 percent in 2008 and 129 percent in 2007.
The reason, says EMarketer which released the results, is due to a drop in spending at MySpace.
EMarketer estimated in its December 2008 forecast that marketers would spend $630 million to advertise on MySpace in 2009. That estimate has now been reduced 15 percent to just 495 million.
News Corp. executives said in a May 6 conference call with financial analysts that ad revenues fell 16 percent at Fox Interactive Media (FIM) in the January–March 2009 quarter, compared with the previous year. MySpace makes up the bulk of FIM’s revenues. (News Corp. does not break out MySpace revenues separately.)
MySpace’s woes are not reflected in estimates for other social networking companies. Ad spend on Facebook is expected to increase 9.5 percent in 2009, to $230 million, while US ad spending on widgets and applications is projected to reach $70 million, up 75 percent from 2008. U.S. spending on all other social network sites combined is expected to rise 1.5 percent to $345 million.
EMarketer has also issued estimates for ad spending on MySpace and Facebook outside the U.S., the first time the research firm has reached beyond the U.S.
Overall, marketers worldwide are expected to spend $520 million to advertise on MySpace in 2009, with $495 million coming from the US and $25 million from other markets. Non-US spending on Facebook is expected to reach $70 million this year, for a total of $300 million in 2009.
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