The once powerful and global leading social network MySpace has now finally sold after months of online buzz following the declaration from New Corp. that they were ready to sell the site in February this year. It is thought that News corp. will keep a 5-10% stake but will have lost out hugely after purchasing the website for $580 million from its original owners.
The buyers Specific Media scooped up the website for a mere $35 million (approx £22m), a snip for the once dominant social network? Well that will be proven in the coming months. However, if Bebo is anything to go by, the purchasing of once popular social networks could prove to be a poor decision. Bebo sold for whopping $850m to AOL at its peak in March 2008 but sold a year ago for a measly $10m.
It appears that CEO Mike Jones will be leaving the company along with a large number of the current staff, some reports indicating up to 50% of the team could lose their jobs.
“In conjunction with the deal, we are conducting a series of restructuring initiatives, including a significant reduction in our workforce. I will assist Specific with the transition over the next two months before departing my role as MySpace CEO.”
A more interesting rumour is that Justin Timberlake is to take the ownership stake in Myspace as the new owners concentrate on giving the website a core music focus.
Source: Mashable
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Sharing, we all do it on the web, a lot of the time we probably don’t even realise we’re doing it; posting a link to our Facebook profile, re-tweeting an interesting post, social bookmarking, even forwarding an email. It happens all the time, everywhere, and this phenomenon is now so big, it’s time to take notice of how it affects online marketing.
A recent study has shown that traffic resultant from sharing now accounts for about 10% of all internet traffic (that’s huge!) and 31% of all referral traffic to sites from search & social platforms.
So where is all this traffic coming from, where are people sharing? Well, as you probably predicted, Facebook leads the way. With a whopping 38% of all share traffic coming from this site alone, Facebook has yet another title to add to it’s many record breaking achievements. Well, with over 500 million users on a site that is basically dedicated to sharing, it’s not really surprising. The next biggest sharing contender is Email, generating 17% of share traffic, followed by Twitter at 11%, giving us three major players in the sharing world.
These figures have come from shared content that is actually clicked on. If you look at just how much content was shared but not necessarily clicked on by the person it was shared with, Facebook is accountable for 56%.
So, if you want to spread the word, Facebook’s the place to be. But what about if you need some interaction with the content once it’s shared? In terms of shared links, it appears Twitter users click through more than users of other platforms. The average Twitter link is clicked 4.8 times, compared to 4.3 for Facebook and 1.7 for email.
The lesson here is that sharing is a big deal. It’s now forming a huge part of our online experience and if you’re not taking full advantage of it, you’ll definitely want to do something about it. Social network users, blog readers & email recipients are sharing things themselves, you’ve just got to start it off.
Here at Clicky Media™ we offer a number of solutions to help you take full advantage of these sharing trends. We offer social media management, blog creation, email marketing & many more avenues into the online sharing world. Call us today to discuss the best option for you, or alternatively, get in touch via the website, just click here >>
Source: TechCrunch.com, ShareThis
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