MySpace.... POOF!

Remember in 2006 when MySpace was the coolest thing around and nobody had really done anything with Facebook? I do. I recall thinking that making my personal profile the best around was going to catapult me to the highest and loftiest reaches of... well, the highest point of somewhere. I changed the HTML before you could go to some "Trick Your Space" page. I hand coded my personal MySpace and was proud that I stood out. That was 2006.

We customized a MySpace page for Rhys Carter Studios. Nice graphics, great logo, and Tomas Aguirre looking at each visitor with his piercing blue eyes. And yes, we even used a program to help us find potential friends. Using a program to find friends gave us an acute awareness of the MySpace demise.

Since we are in the Adult business (gay porn... it is what it is), we checked out other gay adult "actors" and looked at their friend's list. Did we copy? Damn right we did. We wanted the following: male, 18 and over, and ONLINE WITHIN THE LAST 30 DAYS. We didn't just add friends to add friends, we wanted to add friends who would actually pay attention to us. Friends that would fit into our demographic group. We compiled a list with close to 15,000 names and profiles. We weeded out the girls, the underage, and the folks who had not used their MySpace within the last 30 days.

Can you guess the result? Well, let's figure that out of 15,000 profiles there were maybe half in the female category. Okay, we'll buy that. Let's say we are with 7,000 profiles. Now we can remove a few due to being underage (and while our list was compiled from other adult sites, we don't allow underage friends..... shame on you other adult sites for blindly allowing underage friends!). Anyway, the sum total that we could send our list to was less than 700 profiles! Roughly 10% of the list have been active on MySpace within the last 30 days. 90% have moved to another social network.

Thus, we will not win the "Most friends on MySpace" award. We don't want it. It means nothing to us, but MySpace is a venue for free social marketing. However, as we opened our MySpace page yesterday we noticed something peculiar. MySpace.... POOF! Our account was deleted with no explanation, email, "go to hell," or "shame on you for putting gay pictures (no nudity...btw) online!"

So if we are keeping count: AOL, Friendster, hi5, and MySpace. Oh, and don't forget a blast from the past: GeoCities. Question looms: how many minutes on the "15 minutes of fame" does Facebook have left? Maybe 3?

http://rhyscarterstudios.com

-Evan

Rhys Carter Studios