Back in 2005, MySpace had just become the darling of social networking. So much so that it attracted the interest of Rupert Murdoch and his friends at News Corporation, which beat MTV to the punch and bought MySpace—joining it with such“legacy media” as the Fox Television Network, co-owned cable channels like Fox News, Fox Sports, FX, Speed Channel, andFuelTV, as well as long-standing print enterprises the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal—the latter eventually bought by News Corp. in 2007.
The MySpace brand was extended by News Corp. to also tie-in with a couple dozen or so TV stations in many of the largest cities in the US, all co-owned and affiliated with the Fox Network. The stations’ websites ended up using MyFox in their domain names, such as myfoxny.com for WNYW-Fox 5 in New York City, myfoxla.com for KTTV-Fox 11 in Los Angeles, and myfoxaustin.com for KTBC-Fox 7 in Austin, TX.
But very recently, the Wall Street Journal was not giving co-owned MySpace enough love, at least not from a business perspective, when they ran a story detailing MySpace’s revenue and visitor traffic declines, and the trouble MySpace has had in selling to advertisers. In terms of revenue and online visits, MySpace is practically back to where they were in 2006. The declines can be blamed on Facebook having overtaken MySpace in 2008, and haven’t stopped even after MySpace was recently reinvented to be less about the social networking and more about the music and entertainment.
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In August 2010, the market research firm Morpace came out with a study that said only 52% of all TV viewing is what the study describes as “live,” but I would describe as “on the channels’ schedules,” with 41% of 18-34 year-olds—a demographic prized quite often by advertisers based on perception—doing the same. The same study also concluded that more than half—51%—say they watch some video online, and concludes that TV and Internet will, in the next few years, become more integrated.
The question then becomes one of whether video channels, as people have known them since the 1950’s, still matter? Oh, they do, for right now, in some capacity or other, as sure as there is a market for people who still want to watch shows on the channels’ schedules, given the high viewership numbers for such well-established TV favorites like the National Football League, “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars,” and the Academy Awards.
But when people find nothing to watch on the 300 or so channels offered via their cable system or satellite dish, they might be joining the growing undercurrent of Internet video watchers, which totaled over 171,000,000 in January 2011, with Google’s YouTube accounting for more than 1/3 of the nearly 4.9 billion viewing sessions that month.
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