Giving them the ability to add music, change the complete look and feel just ruins the experience of finding information. Look at Facebook, it is a completely structured system. This makes no sense and has no advantage.

I know I can go to anyone’s page and know where to look for news, photos, videos personal information. MySpace has tried to address this but it is still just a mess – it didn’t see the threat early and didn’t respond when it did.

Now the site is relegated to artists, musicians and the like, with perhaps 50% of its users rarely if ever using the site.

Look at Facebook and Twitter, both completely structured systems. Both of course clueless how to make any money, but very popular.

Actually they could make good money (by just offering premium like services such as extended versions, massive storage for photographs, vidoes etc in respect to Facebook) , but the problem is again, the shareholders want to make ridiculous amounts of money and will therefore ruin the experience with stupid ads everywhere.

I hope both Twitter and Faqcebook just go down the extended paths offering upgrades to massive storage for native images and video storage etc. $30 per annum for 50% of users extra would reap a billion bucks a year.

MySpace has lost more than half of its market share in the past year even though Australians have doubled the amount of time they spend on social networking sites in that period.

New figures released by Nielsen this week revealed that Australians spent 1.6 million hours on social media sites in June this year, up from 800,000 hours a year earlier.

The two major beneficiaries of the social media rush have been Facebook and Twitter, which, according to Nielsen, now have 8 million and 1.5 million unique Australian users, respectively.

I guess he blames Google for this too! To read the article

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/myspace-tanks-as-social-networks-soar-20091014-gwxj.html

Putting their money where their mouth is would be so good.
A little Disallow: / and Google would be forced to stop indexing their news.
Then they could rule the world with their paid news!

Or Google would just send everyone elsewhere, the world would move on, and News Ltd would crumble.

Actually I quite like the last scenario.

As my site grows in popularity, I might start adding more advertisers and at least cover some costs. But even if I was the bible for real estate agents and was so popular, I would still want to utilise the same services.

Google may well just ask them if they want to be de-indexed. I am sure I know what the answer would be.

Rupert needs ideas and from what I can tell – none are coming from inside the building.

I agree Rupert has absolutely no idea where his paper network is crumbling as against being on fire. With interest I have observed News ltd and Fairfax media debate that they are reviewing paid websites which simply will never work as all that will happen is that the online traffic will move to http://www.abc.net.au which just like the BBC will always be free. if you are going to charge for third party advertisers then you have to have traffic – lose the traffic and down comes the advertising revenues.

Rupert should just retire gracefully as he is losing his relevance when he starts talking about online strategies that he simply fails to properly comprehend.