August 26th, 2006
MySpace Should Let Users Create Their Own Magazines
I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems to be (see John Smith, with a very funny mock magazine cover, John Paczkowski, and the always enjoyably incisiveness of Mike at Techdirt) .
What pains me about such “strategy decay” (as Umair would put it) is that it doesn’t have to be this way. All MySpace needs to do is look at the central driver of its own success — letting users create their own spaces. So having a bunch of editors create a one-size-fits-all printed “space” is running full tilt in the opposite direction.
Instead, why not create a publishing tool that lets MySpace users convert their pages and their friends’ pages into a print publication? The tool could generate PDF files that users could print out on their own — OR, MySpace could pursue some actual innovation, in the area of cheap, print-on-demand technology, which might allow groups of friends to create magazines that MySpace would print and mail to them — instead of that one-size-fits all magazine that nobody will want because its so diametrically opposed to what MySpace is all about.
Assuming that MySpace can enable the publication of magazines that users actually want to read (because they created them), what about the business model? Well, MySpace could charge users to print their custom magazines, but I’m not sure if being a printing press is such a great business (unless MySpace really innovates on the print-on-demand front). MySpace could certainly sell ad space that is automatically inserted into each custom publication — which rationalizes how the users are able to get them for free — same deal as all other free Web 2.0 services. OR — MySpace could sell advertisers into an ad page pool and then let the USERS choose which ads to put in their publications. Such user placement would be a great implied endorsement to friends who read each other’s custom publications. Even better, give users tools to create their own ads for brands they use.
Of course, there’s the problem of MySpace having no control over the content that their advertisers appear next to, which might put the same cramp in their print ad sales as it has in their web ad sales. Then there’s the question of why bother with print at all when digital media is so much more of an efficient, flexible and networked form of custom publishing.
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Part of the problem is that most of the content already on MySpace isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to read in a magazine. Maybe you could pull something out of the blogs and group fora, but it would take a lot of sifting and editing.
If they wanted to make it really user-generated, they’d create something like a mini-site for the magazine, with a message system that would allow MySpace users to submit articles. That would still take some editing and sorting, but at least the content would already be roughly in the form of something that belongs in a magazine. MySpace has enough people that the lure of being published could result in enough decent material to make a magazine fly. And they could count on MySpace users buying it to see who made it in each time.
it really has a better return on investment than old-fashioned ads. I want to think it does, but there are no hard numbers available) One of Dan’s best points is that something like PayPerPost may be a more natural advertising medium than what the ridiculous old-media plays MySpace, YouTube and other 2.0 companies are pulling, at the insistance of the old grey men that have bought them. No one is going to have their opinion swayed by a Dodge Caliber page on MySpace. But if MySpace users started giving their honest opinions on the
I think you are right that allowing people choose their own magazine content would work. If MySpace could be searched and treated like a store front, picking a little of this and a little of that then printing at your leisure the effect would be interesting to say the least.
I think a PDF for home printing much like the G24 product allows from The Guardian but giving the user more choice of content would work well. (although there might be some copyright issues) The lure of POD magazines does hover just over the horizon though.
Eoin
You are 100% correct on this one Scott.
Scott Karps publishing 2.0 has a nice riff on MySpace magazine idea and proposes that users could choose their own magazine content. I agree. It also echoes something that both Bloglily and I mentioned following my recent post on magazines. Here Sometimes being in publishing is fun. At least for Richard Charkin. Here
“If agencies were smart, they would be scrambling to set up Brand Archeology departments staffed with researchers and lawyers whose sole job is to find lapsed trademarks.” Tags: business marketing advertising branding history MySpace Should Let Users Create Their Own Magazines “MySpace could sell advertisers into an ad page pool and then let the USERS choose which ads to put in their publications. Such user placement would be a great implied endorsement to friends who read each other’s custom publications.”
Stuff I ReadAgency Business Opportunity: Brand ArchaeologyMySpace Should Let Users Create Their Own Magazines
[...] Sign of Apocalypse 2.0? by Mark Evans on Thu 24 Aug 2006 12:48 PM AKDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos How should one read into an AdAge story that MySpace is holding talks withNylon about the launch of a magazine - you know, those old-style, paper-based publications with glossy covers. “We’re in the process of modeling it,” an executive involved in the discussions told AdAge. “Our main concern is the MySpace brand. We don’t want to do anything that would hurt the brand.” Apparently, this potential magazine would focus on the interests of popular MySpace members. Interesting idea but I was under the impression the MySpace generation has abandoned magazines, newspapers, etc., which is why advertisers are rushing to the Web to reach young consumers. People Magazine, for example, recently decided to scrap the paper version of Teen People and make it a Web-only property. MySpace’s apparent interest in a magazine reminds me of the dot-com days when Business 2.0 put out issues teeming with so many ads it eventually felt compelled to go bi-weekly to meet demand (and, of course, cash in on all those free-spending dot-coms). Who knows, maybe the MySpace folks figure there is room to extend the brand and the “platform” but it seems like an odd strategic foray.Update: If a MySpace magazine is possible, how far could the brand be extended? What about youth-oriented products such as condoms, CDs, mobile phones, video games? Peter Cashmore thinks a MySpace idea is a terrible idea because there would be distribution costs and the content would never be as diverse as the Web. Seamus McCauley, however, believes the concept is a “surprisingly subtle strategy”, while Scott Karp describes the idea as an “April Fool’s Joke” before pondering whether MySpace should create a tool for its member to create personalized magazines used PDF files. [...]
model on the back end of an established social network may be the viable model we have been looking for - it is pulling the contributions from an established commmunity of contributors as opposed to hoping the contributions will build the community. - Scott Karp writes that users should be able to create their own magazine I personally think it is a great idea. Think about all of the amazing stories on MySpace, and no annoying writers to deal with. It gives the company a chance to show that it is more than sexual
Ya sucedió hace 6 años, en tiempos de la famosa burbuja, cuando eBay o Yahoo fracasaron con sus publicaciones impresas. Y es que no se pueden aplicar los viejos modelos a los nuevos medios. La cosa se anima. De momento, los propios usuarios se han lanzado a crear ellos mismos sus propuestas de revista, en linea con la filosofÃa libre y abierta de la comunidad virtual, pero con la oposición de la empresa propietaria de la marca.