Half of MySpace users will be on mobile in two years, official says
SAN FRANCISCO -- Just about every application is going mobile, as Apple Inc.'s iPhone App Store has shown with its 1 billion-plus downloads.
Banking, gaming and messaging are among the broad categories of applications available on mobile devices, so it's no wonder that creators of social networks are gravitating to the mobile world as well.
MySpace Inc. is no exception, said John Faith, general manager of MySpace Mobile, during a keynote address at the GoMobile 2009 conference here.
When MySpace first began creating a mobile presence more than two years ago, the challenge was finding ways to pare down the MySpace social networking Web site so it would fit on smartphones and other small-screen wireless devices.
But a number of updates have given mobile users more of the desktop-type MySpace -- and more mobile advertising. "We run a profitable business off mobile advertising," Faith said.
MySpace learned that it has to convince advertisers of the value of mobile ads, which are best suited for the "end user who is away from a PC but [wants] something there and now," according to Faith.
"It's a great time to work in the mobile space, and we have seen 450% year-over-year growth in mobile [subscribers]," he said. "The time of the mobile Internet is now."
Faith didn't say how many users are connected to MySpace Mobile, but he did predict that half the traffic on MySpace will be from mobile devices in the next two years.
Of the top 25 mobile devices contacting and using MySpace, 11 are smartphones, nine are smartphone-like devices with QWERTY keyboards, one is a gaming console and four are multimedia- and music-capable phones.
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