Saturday, April 29, 2006

Myspace founder Chris Dewolfe and the actual Tom Anderson live with Rupert Murdoch

From the pages of the New York Times:

ALMOST on a lark, Chris DeWolfe bought the Internet address MySpace.com in 2002, figuring that it might be useful someday. At first, he used the site to peddle a motorized contraption, made in China and called an E-scooter, for $99.

Selling products online comes naturally to him. Having jumped into the Internet business in the early days, Mr. DeWolfe had become a master of the aggressive forms of online marketing, including e-mail messages and pop-up advertising. After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.

Very quickly, however, Mr. DeWolfe's tactics for MySpace changed. He had noticed the popularity of Friendster, a rapidly growing Web site that let people communicate with their friends and meet the friends of their friends. What would happen, he wondered, if he combined this type of social networking with the sort of personal expression enabled by other sites for creating Web pages or online journals?

He convinced the executives of eUniverse, the company that had bought his own marketing firm, ResponseBase, to back his plan. As soon as the site was reintroduced, in the summer of 2003, Mr. DeWolfe saw it grow quickly with little marketing. And although his scrappy backer was hungry for cash, he resisted pressure to flood MySpace with advertising and to turn all of its members into money.

"Chris came from ResponseBase, and they knew all the direct marketing tactics to get money out of almost anything," said Brett C. Brewer, the former president of eUniverse, which was later renamed Intermix Media. "But I give him credit: from literally the first or second month, he realized MySpace could be something we really need to protect because user confidence in the site was paramount."

Now MySpace has a new owner — Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which bought MySpace and Intermix last year for $649 million — and the pressure on Mr. DeWolfe to find a way to make much more money from MySpace is far greater.

But the opportunity is greater, too. More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.

continued at www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/business/yourmoney/23myspace.h...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sirs: I make so bold to state that THe New York TImes, that nice old lady, has been made a fool of by TOm Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, who are no more the "brains" behind MySpace than I am. My name is Alan MacLEese and I am a retired newspaperman who recently teamed up with L.A. blogger Trent Lapinski to find out who the real owners of MySpace, its adulterous parent, Intermix, and its avaricious ventures were and lo, it turns out that disgraced Portland Oregon tycoon Andrew ALan Wiederhorn and his wife Tiffany, and Andrew Alan's longtime mentor and crony Clarence B. (Uncle Bud) Coleman, San Leandro, Calif., and his wife Joan, are the power, the glory, the infamy behind the fire sale to Murdoch with the background of insider trading and profiteering by the Wiederhorns and the COlemans and their supple and glib cabin boys Anderson and DeWolfe who, while crafty little nippers, could not found dick, let alone an enterprise such as that engineered by the old man COleman and the middle-aged ex-con Wiederhorn. Check out Lapinski's blogs, my posting on Catbird Forum, and a whole lot of seething and bubbling on the web over a dirty big secret that will soon out and leave most of the national media with bright red faces for having bought a classic con, swallowed the guff hook, line and sinker, and well, I am glad I am a retired newspaperman on this day, a day in which citizens have to smuggle news into the newsrooms of the nation. al macleese, living and reachabble in Hallowell maine where life is as it ought to be.