MySpace goes to print

News today (AdAge) that MySpace plans to launch a magazine. PaidContent calls the move "almost inevitable in today's multi-platform age"; Mashable thinks it a "terrible idea".

Inevitability is perhaps a little strong, but cross-media is a strategy familiar to any publisher with a strong web and print presence (such as, let's say, MySpace owner News Corp). As Terry Heaton tells us, "Doug Rushkoff argues effectively that the web is a social phenomenon, not a media phenomenon or a technological phenomenon." MySpace is the exemplar of this reality - a place where users go not to consume content in the old media sense but to interact with other users. There is almost no cross-over between the function of the MySpace website and the potential function of a MySpace magazine, and it is this apparent absence of any important cross-platform synergy that makes me think MySpace may be pursuing a surprisingly subtle strategy.

Consider: the problem with monetising MySpace is well known, and is bound up with two related phenomena: the reluctance of advertisers to associate their brands with the often prurient, focusless, anti-commercial anarchy of an unmoderated social networking site on the one hand; and the difficulty of interrupting what is fundamentally a social, not a media, experience for the users with a commercial message on the other. The solution? Package up fragments of content from around MySpace into content-specific vertical bundles. With 100 million users MySpace may well generate mostly social chatter that it would be commercial suicide to impose controls over...but it is amongst other things a blogging platform and it also generates posts of interest to a wider audience about sports, cars, health, politics and of course music. Ask the users to tag their posts by content set if they're happy to have them appear in the relevant vertical content sub-site. Many (most) of the posts won't get a tag; many (most) won't be of general interest. But 100 million users? They'll produce enough music-tagged posts every day to power a music news content channel.

Hence the magazine. "See your name in print". It's a powerful incentive to get involved - to tag your music posts with the "music" and "publish" tags. Perhaps there will be some sort of compensation for the writers of posts that are used - if other citizen journalism ventures are anything to go by (I'm thinking of course of Oh My News) the compensation seemingly needs to be little more than trivial. Monetising MySpace has been problematic. But that's thinking like a bundle publisher, like a newspaper or (indeed) a magazine. Chop up MySpace into content vertical sub-sites, just like its users chop it up into sub-networks of 150 friends. Advertisers might be wary of advertising run-of-network on MySpace qua MySpace. But they'll advertise on the (sub-edited? moderated?) content-led music sub-site. And they'll advertise in the magazine that flows cost-effectively from it.