Like most people, I haven't visited my MySpace page in years. But when I signed up, I supplied them with a lot of personal information, such as age, address, maybe even favorite music. The value of the company, based on traffic that viewed its advertising, plummeted from its sale price to News Corp of over $500m to around $30m when it was recently sold.
The loss of value was shocking to the industry, and it makes me wonder if, with all the experts and management takeovers in recent years, relaunches and new strategies, did they miss an obvious source of revenue that the new investors will reap?
A few things we know about MySpace: it had hundreds of millions of users, mostly 15-25, starting in about 2005. Based on their previous behavior, maybe there are future values to this data that has not been accounted for, or even considered a possibility.
That is, what about email marketing to those addresses?
For example, MySpace knows when a lot of people are going to graduate high school and college in the next few years. With so many users, a student loan email may not convert many people but those it did would have high value. MySpace knows when certain users are getting driver's licenses and getting to be legal age.
These might be lowest-common-denominator sort of products, but MySpace was already famous for that. These are very elementary examples of behavior that could be gleaned from their data. There must be something in there... seems like a steal, $30m for such a vast trove of data from around the globe. The speed of the company's life cycle means a lot of this info is still valid, to look on the bright side again.
