I keep reading all of these articles talking about how MySpace is (or might be) serving more videos than YouTube according to comScore data. I don’t actually find this hard to believe. Nowadays, most of the core functions on the web are becoming commodities — IM, video uploading and playback, email, social networking, etc. The core differentiator is whether or not a given site has a community or not. MySpace has a community of some 100 million odd registered users — nowadays I think you can launch just about any kind of “me too” product that makes sense for your community and expect some real success. I have no problem believing that MySpace video might be more heavily trafficked than YouTube and that their IM client might become a real force in the market.
There is another lesson here . I don’t think there is much of a business model in providing things for the MySpace ecosytem. They have the platform and the users — if they want to launch a feature, they will and it will likely be well received. I think this explains why MySpace has built so many of them own tools or licensed them from lesser-known providers — they are the brand.