In late June, it was announced that Specific Media had agreed to acquire Myspace for just $35 million (News Corp. had paid $580 million for it before that). It was also revealed that actor/pop sensation Justin Timberlake would be part owner.
Specific Media has put together what it calls a major presence at Advertising Week in NY this week, and a representative for the firm tells WebPronews it “will be leveraging the attention-garnering nature of the event to share what the company has learned since its acquisition of Myspace.”
Execs are at the event to offer insights into the direction of Myspace, and share plans for its future. Tonight, there is a “Future of Myspace” talk taking place at the event with CEO Tim Canderhook, COO Chris Vanderhook and Timberlake will talk about their vision for the site.
Here’s what Myspace looks like today:
What direction will it go in? Timberlake has been quoted in the past as saying:
“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place. Art is inspired by people and vice versa, so there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”
There’s another site called Facebook that’s been filling that void pretty well for about 800 million people. There was a movie about it. Justin Timberlake was in it.
But we’ll see what Myspace has in store tonight.
Myspace still had nearly 28 million unique visitors in August in the U.S. alone, according to data from Compete. While the downward slope is crystal clear, that’s still a pretty nice chunk of users, considering that most of them are probably also Facebook users.
Specific Media didn’t buy Myspace because they thought it didn’t still have value. Hopefully they won’t alienate the users they still have the way Delicious seems to have done.
What direction should Myspace take? Let us know what you think.