What's New at MySpace?

Well, MySpace was a hero -- sort of.

Five teenagers were arrested yesterday in Riverton, Kansas and are expected to be charged in connection with their plans to carry out a shooting at their high school on the seventh anniversary of the Columbine High School rampage in Colorado. According to local authorities, four of the suspects were taken into custody at their homes while the fifth was nabbed at school. One of the teens had a cache of weapons—including guns, knives, and ammo—hidden away in his bedroom.

One of the students arrested had posted a message on his MySpace account in which he talked about the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth as well as the Columbine shootings, both of which occured on April 20. School officials were informed of the message's existence and followed up with the student in question as well as many of his friends.

Two nights ago, one of the conspirators reportedly gave a North Carolina woman the lowdown on the planned attack, including names of potential victims. She then notified the police, who moved in and made the arrests.

Some of you may be wondering how serious they were -- why would they tell the world their plan? Some kids in Riverton are skeptical, too.

A student at the small-town high school where five teenagers are accused of planning an attack said Friday that rumors were rampant on the day before their arrest, prompting some schoolmates to tell the suspects: "Whatever you do, don't shoot me."

Freshman Nathan Spriggs, 15, also said his friends, who are accused of planning to shoot fellow students and school employees, had posted a threat on the Internet as a joke and were concerned they would be suspended or expelled for doing it. . .

Some students said they doubted the youths intended to carry out the threat. They also said they were not alarmed that authorities found guns in one suspect's bedroom because it is not uncommon in rural Kansas for youths to have access to hunting weapons.

One suspect has a history of school fights and had made such comments as, "I wish so and so died," or "I am going to shoot someone," said Brandon Hay, 18, a senior.

"We knew it was joking around," said Hay, whose brother is a close friend of the suspects. "They weren't bullied a whole lot. They bullied a few kids."

Others who knew the suspects said the boys had friends at school.

"Everybody has their own group," said Ronni Paxson, 17, a senior. "The school is small. Everybody knows everybody."

But who knows? Better safe than sorry. Some things it's better not to joke about.

Overall, a plus for MySpace, I think. Keith Olbermann had something like "MySpace Says the Day" on a Countdown segment. Nevertheless, there's guilt by association: MySpace-Riverton-Columbine-shooting.

And today (Sunday, April 23) a big article in the Business Section of The New York Times.

The emphasis is on the possiblility of MySpace, with its 70 million "friends" as a cash cow for Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp. The problem, as we've mention before, is NewsCorp has to be careful not to change the atmosphere of MySpace. If the advertising gets too intrusive, will MySpace lose its cool?

In buying MySpace, Mr. Murdoch also bought a tantalizing problem: how to tame a vast sea of fickle and unruly teenagers and college students just enough to notice advertising or to buy things, yet not make the site so commercial that he scares off his audience. At the same time, he must address the real and growing concerns of parents and teachers who see MySpace as a den of youthful excess and, potentially, as a lure for sexual predators.

Or are young people today accepting of advertising as a fact of life? I mean, whenever I heard Nike using John Lennon's "Revolution" to sell sneakers, I thought "blasphemy!" But I'm from a different time. I don't think I could be friends with a deodorant --

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial "friends" can even send them messages — ads, really, but of a whole new kind

-- but then remember that seventh grader who put Axe Body Spray into his poster of "The Four Most Important Things in My Life".

And apparently there are 100,000 young people out there desperate enough to want to be friends with a hamburger.

Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, for example, created a profile for the animated square hamburger character from its television campaign. About 100,000 people signed up to be "friends" with the square.

There's some disagreement over the direction of MySpace between the new management and the old.

Another question is this: Can the News Corporation achieve these goals if the executives in charge don't agree on how to do so, or even on whether they want to? Mr. Levinsohn [new management], for example, said he saw opportunity in the one million bands that have established profiles on MySpace; he said MySpace could charge bands to promote concerts or to sell their songs directly through the site.

In an interview the next day, however, Mr. DeWolfe [old management] dismissed the idea. "Music brings a lot of traffic into MySpace," he said, "and it lets us sell very large sponsorships to those brands that want to reach consumers who are interested in music. We never thought charging bands was a viable business model."

Music has always been a key element of MySpace, and DeWolfe still has some interesting ideas with how to integrate it into the MySpace experience.

MySpace members can become "friends" with a profile for "MySpace Secret Shows," for instance, and they will receive tips about free concerts — sponsored by companies like Tower Records — in their hometowns.

On a recent Friday in Manhattan, several hundred people trekked through drizzling rain to the Tower Records store in the East Village for free tickets to a concert by Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish postpunk band, at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Heather Candella, a college student from Sloatsburg, N.Y., was among those at the show. She said the shows were "a really good idea because it's kind of a secret kind of thing — it's not so commercial."

Heather uses MySpace in other ways, too.

She added that MySpace had become a main way to stay in touch with her friends. While she does not use the site to meet people, it has become part of the dating ritual. "When you meet someone, the question is not 'What's your number?' " she said. "It's 'What's your MySpace?' "

By checking out a guy's profile, she said, "you can actually get a feeling for who they are."

But to NewsCorp, it's finally all about the money.

At MySpace, the first challenge is to raise advertising rates. Because its supply of pages so greatly outstrips demand from advertisers, it has offered deep discounts. Indeed, the average rate paid for advertising is a bit over a dime for 1,000 impressions, Mr. Levinsohn said, far lower than rates at major competitors. "If we can raise that by 10 cents, think of the upside," he said.

Another question is -- despite the huge number of people on MySpace, is it a good place to sell?

The answer he received was a shock. Not one of them, not even the mighty Google, was sure that it could provide enough advertisements to fill all the pages that MySpace displays each day, Mr. Levinsohn said. The search companies did not want to dilute their networks with so many ads for MySpace users, whom they said were not the best prospects for most marketing because they use MySpace for socializing, not buying.

One way around that is to customize the placement of ads. And of course, the more you know about your possible audience, the better you can target your ads.

Mr. Levinsohn says he also hopes to raise ad rates by collecting more user data so advertisers can find the most promising prospects. To use the site, people need to provide their age, location and sex, and often volunteer their sexual orientation and personal interests. Some of that information is already being used to select ads to display. Soon, the site will track when users visit profile pages and other sections devoted to topics of interest to advertisers. People who put information about sports cars in their profiles or who frequent MySpace message boards about hot-rodding, for example, would be shown ads for car parts, even while reading messages from friends.

And could that work on a very small scale -- to a region or even a town. Could you see yourself being friends with the Big Y, or the Mobil station?

Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses. A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said.

Yet here is another place that executives at Fox and MySpace don't see eye to eye. Mr. DeWolfe discounted the idea of people creating profile pages for small businesses. "If it was a really commercial profile — the gas station down the street — no one is going to sign up to be one of their friends," he said. "There is nothing interesting about it."

That's up to the business. If prices are the same, why would you go to one station over another? If I felt like I was an insider, part of a club -- if I got something free or discounted every so often because of it, I'd go there rather than down the street.