For those who may not have heard of it, http://MySpace.com is an enormous "social networking" website that has taken the internet by storm. As of early 2007, it was estimated that nearly half of the American populace over the age of 14 had at least one account at MySpace, with the result of account numbers approaching 150 million as of this writing. Every day thousands of new accounts are created at MySpace, many of these for marketing purposes. But is it a good idea to use this vast resource for marketing and attempts at making money online?



The story goes that MySpace was originally designed with musicians and artists in mind, even thought its founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe were clearly tried-and-true businessmen themselves whose previous businesses included selling email addresses to marketers, resulting in numerous complaints about spamming. The long and tumultuous history of MySpace ended up with young Tom and Chris making a fortune when MySpace was bought by megamedia maven Rupert Murdoch for hundreds of millions of dollars. Murdoch promptly aimed to turn MySpace into another of his corpulent cash cows.

With such a background, it would seem that MySpace would be a rich mine for marketing and marketers, and many people believe that it is. In fact, many marketers have made thousands - some, rumor has it, even millions - of dollars on MySpace, and an entire industry of MySpace marketing techniques and products has cropped up, including ebooks, video courses and software. Some of these methods and products are legit, in the sense that they play by the MySpace rules, but a number of them violate MySpace's rigid "anti-marketing" terms of service. This fact has not stopped either unwary or unscrupulous individuals from using these services to create a massive amount of accounts with automated software that includes the ability to add thousands of friends per day, for example, essentially developing a huge "mailing list" to send messages and bulletins to. MySpace's non-marketing population, however, becomes peeved with the endless solicitations to download ringtones and engage in other marketing ploys. With enough complaints from the MySpace community, these accounts are quickly deleted, without notice. With such a large number of accountholders, however, not a few innocent individuals have gotten caught in this trap as well and had their accounts summarily removed. The question remains then, can the MySpace community bring fruits to its laborers? Technically, yes, because MySpace's purported purpose is to showcase talent and creativity, such that musicians and artists, for example, are actually encouraged to market or "show themselves off."

All of the marketing prohibition appears odd in consideration of the fact that MySpace itself appears to have been devised with the desire of targeting the youthful demographic of 18-35, with its large amount of disposable income. MySpace itself uses the personal information provided by users to sell to them, but its TOS are evidence that it is jealously guarding its market. Nevertheless, even while adhering strictly to MySpace's terms of service there are certainly "kosher" ways to make money on this megasite, and many will continue to do so. With an enormous online presence that has eclipsed even Google, it seems that MySpace and its bevy of hungry artists and marketers are here to stay.