MySpace’s Portal Plans (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before)

Last week, the media was all over the fact that MySpace wants to be a portal and get its share of the ad dollars that currently go to the existing portals: Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google. Anyone who’s been following social networks for very long couldn’t have thought this was new news.

After all, MySpace’s pitch just a couple years ago was that it was (drumroll please) a next-generation portal. Then, the company de-emphasized that idea in its pitch. Then, last week, it resurfaced.

What gives? Well, pundits have been clamoring on about the death of the portal for years now, but it still hasn’t happened. The big four (ie Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google) this year are expected to rack up $14.8 billion in US ad revenue (according to my fellow eMarketer analyst David Hallerman) — that’s 57% of total US online ad spending. In other words, a very big chunk of the pie.

By contrast, I project that MySpace will generate just $755 million in the US this year, only half of the projected take of AOL, the smallest of the big four.

But what really concerns me is that by positioning itself as a portal and selling off its home page as mass-reach inventory (last week the home page featured a “skin” and trailer from the new Batman movie “The Dark Knight” that kept crashing my browser), MySpace is discounting the very thing that makes a social network an exciting ad environment: the viral spreading of marketing messages from marketer to consumer and on to other consumers.

In a recessionary environment, I can understand how a Web company might want to speak the language of the mass-market ad buyers (reach, frequency, banner, CPM) in order to get a share of budget. But by focusing so heavily on the “portalness” of MySpace, the company also risks losing what ground it has gained in establishing MySpace as a way for marketers to engage consumers on a deeper level and foster the viral spreading of messages.

Perhaps MySpace hopes that its mass-reach positioning will open the door to skittish advertisers, who may try a more experimental form of social network advertising down the line.

Gartner, Generation V and Data Portability

A lot of stuff in that headline…

Gartner has been espousing the concept of Generation V, a psychographic group defined by the fluidity with which it uses technology. Unlike Gen X or Gen Y, Gen V is not defined by age or any other demographic, but by the way they create multiple online personas and look to the Internet first for information, communication and sharing.

In a recent Forbes article, Gartner analyst Adam Sarner states: “Generation V members create multiple, often anonymous, personae to control relevant information flow into the community and businesses.” These personas range from Amazon buyer to eBay seller to YouTuber. The point is that in each environment, a person may take on different personality attributes and interact differently than they would in other environments.

This has big implications for the data portability initiatives that so many companies are developing. Facebook, Google and MySpace all are vying to be the single source where people keep their personal profile information. In general, this means that if you visit a site that has partnered with one of the three sites, you could “auto fill” (that’s the easiest way to think of it) your profile information into the new site.

But do you want to be the same person at every site? I don’t. And I certainly don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring out what part of my MySpace or Facebook profile I might want to reveal on site X, site Y or site Z.

I have a lot of questions about how all this will work and if Gartner is right about Generation V, then there may not be much future to data portability.