When MySpace launched a news site in April based on technology from Newroo (a company they acquired in early 2006), people expected it to become fairly dominant fairly fast. But a month later MySpace News had become a ghost town - there were no internal links to the site and it was being completely ignored by the 100+ million people who visit MySpace each month.
Recently that has changed, we’ve noticed. MySpace has started to add links to the property. Display ads like the one above are appearing throughout the site, and there is now a link to “news” on the MySpace home page as well.
And like the recently acquired Newsvine, news items also now have comments, which as far as we know were added today. A look at the site shows a healthy discussion taking place on the top news items.
Comscore and other metrics services will be tracking MySpace News an an independent property. We’ll check back in a couple of months and see how things are going.
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Still says “Beta” on the pages, so a feature release, not coming out of beta.
The site looks much improved from the last time I perused. This has a real shot to be huge. More ads for MySpace.
awesome verticals, a welcome change to the nice pleasing UI, love it….. great job newroo
News is not a important element on Social Networking portals.
WebCurrents
News is not an important element? Maybe nationally. But you can’t do local news right without having a good way for people to interact and discuss the issues.
I’m eventually going the OpenID + Open Social route with a site that’s like Digg + local news. It’s hard to overestimate how important the revival of local news and local communication will be as these details on the social side get ironed out.
me like myspace news. me am retard.
With a 100+ million potential audience size, this is a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, I think for 99 million of that audience, news is the last thing on their mind when they are on newspace. Could their patterns change with increased links and exposure of the news page? Sure. It is likely? I doubt it. Lets keep an eye out and see what happens…
Shafqat
Until the “news” becomes something other than tabloid bull, there’s really no reason to choose myspace over another news service.