A testament to this strange new social paradigm is the phrase "Thanks for the Add," a nicety offered when one MySpace user "adds" another as a "friend."
Best yet, to use the site, members must log in, causing them to inadvertently view advertisements, and then read their messages on a page with even more advertisements. In the world of MySpace, spam is earth, air, fire, and water.
Certainly the site is far more advertising-covered than I'd like, but they have large expenses. I can only imagine the bandwidth they use each month with 109 million members. Were I in charge of MySpace I'd probably not use a contextual advertising solution but direct advertising. However, I know they face a hurdle there with some of the 'hot' profiles on the site. And, then again, were I in charge, it probably would not be as successful, because my first step would be to ban users with glittery graphics and more than one video/music start on download. ;)Regardless, I wouldn't be fair to the author if I didn't point out this was a very well written article with excellent research, if written from a decidedly bitter point of view. He does give them some credit here:
Base business details and corporate scandals aside, the crucial story here is how a site built on a foundation of spam has become one of the most culturally, socially, and technologically influential websites in the history of the Internet. To their credit--and an important key to the site's popularity--the MySpace team has intuitively gone with the flow, treating their users as co-developers (whether by luck or by wisdom), and allowing network effects from user contributions to steer their evolution in many ways--a fundamental difference between both Web 1.0/2.0, and Spam 1.0/2.0.
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