Myspace is making a comeback and you just might want to consider throwing some attention for ad dollars to the social media platform that most people have forgotten. Why is that? Because believe it or not, Myspace (no longer using the former MySpace capitalization) still has over 50 million people visiting it every month.
One of the interesting trends is that Myspace is a huge surge in traffic on Thursdays. The popularity of “Throwback Thursdays” means that many people are blogging back into their old Myspace accounts to find an old photo that they can share now – often on Twitter and Facebook.
I have long recommended that anyone involved in the music industry, particularly indie bands, ensure they have a MySpace page. MySpace is still the go to platform for many indie bands and other musicians who get better results from MySpace than they do on Facebook. In fact, they have a specific search bar on their home page tagged with “Welcome to Myspace. Just start typing to find music” and their sidebar search leans heavily to music and videos as well.
Myspace is still growing. According to comScore, in November 2014 Myspace received 575% more unique visitors than they did in the previous month of 2013. So it’s definitely not a platform that is dying, even though many marketers have dismissed it as dead for quite some time.
Even more interesting are the video views. In November Myspace had over 300 million video views, many of them likely music related. But it was enough to rank them 16th on the last comScore Video Metric rankings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
MySpace is also investing in their ad tech, and claim their targeting beats out Facebook’s similar type of targeting through Atlas. Tim Vanderhook, the CEO of Myspace (and their parent company Viant),
According to Mr. Vanderhook, Viant has lined up registration data from multiple online media companies to combine with the MySpace data (he won’t say which companies are supplying the data, but noted it’s not Google, Facebook or Amazon). Viant can then take that registration data, anonymize it, and then connect it with advertisers’ own in-store shopping data.
That combination, which he claims few companies outside of perhaps Facebook are capable of, will provide advertisers with a true read on how their online advertising impacts real world sales.
Viant says it has several big advertisers trying this. Again, Mr. Vanderhook won’t say which brands are involved. Since May the Advertising Cloud suite of products has handled $5 billion in ad transactions for a set of beta advertisers, he said. “We’ve seen return on investment improve by a factor of 10 or 20,” he said. “This is game-changing.”
$5 billion in ad sales transactions is not too shabby, especially since they are currently only running with beta advertisers and have not opened it up to the masses yet. However, it remains to be seen how accurate their data is when it comes to targeting, particularly since they are using some data which is years – or a decade – old.
Despite making a big splash with their new ad technology, they do not seem to have a way for potential advertisers to request access or even to be alerted when it becomes more widely available.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020