Do you know my best friend Tom? Yes Tom the founder of Myspace!

Have you ever seen this picture?



Probabily! It's Tom the founder of Myspace.
One of the biggest success storie in the past few years has been MySpace. It's a social networking website offering an interactive network of photos, blogs, user profiles, groups, and an internal e-mail system.

The history : Tom Anderson wanted to create an online service unlike anything on the Web. He proposed the idea to Chris DeWolfe current 2003.
It would, he said, be the ultimate social hub: part Friendster, part Blogger, part MP3.com, part craigslist. "The idea was that if it was a cool thing to do online, you should be able to do it on MySpace," he says.
They talked about this project to eUniverse which agreed to provide startup capital in exchange for majority interest. They began to work on this project with 5 programmers.
At first it was a small community of artists and musicians, many from the LA area. Quickly, the website exploded and millions of people signed up on Myspace.

In 2005 Myspace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580 million. Tom's done a very good operation!

In an interview with Forbes in January 2006, the MySpace founders, Anderson and DeWolfe talked about their marketing strategy:

How do you get 46 million people to find out about your product without buying advertising?

DeWolfe: It was really key to create a set of functions that were compelling to our users and an efficient way to use them. Users socialize to figure out what they're going to do on the weekend. They use MySpace to discover new music and post events. Musicians upload their music. People use it for entertainment purposes or to sell goods in the classified area. MySpace makes what they do in the offline world

a) more efficient or

b) more interesting.

Anderson: We didn't do traditional marketing, but we did try to find photographers and creative people because we thought that would make the site more interesting. In the beginning, it was all Los Angeles--actors, photographers and musicians. That made for an interesting community, and brought in a lot of people. A lot of the early growth, however, had to do with the features and what our competitors were not allowing people to do.

Music has become particularly important to MySpace. How did you attract over 660,000 artists and bands to the site?

DeWolfe: Tom has a deep passion and understanding for what emerging musicians go through. He understands the frustration. I understood the macro trends of the music business. Labels were signing fewer acts, giving them less time to prove themselves and spending less money on marketing. We saw a need to develop a community for artists to get their music out to the masses. With MySpace, when they went out on tour, they could actually tour nationally. The band might have 20,000 friends on their list and send out a bulletin saying, “I’m going to be in Austin on Tuesday night. Come see our show.” It has allowed bands to make money on music without having a deal.

You can create a professional-sounding CD, sell merchandise and get your touring revenue in and make a living. It gives those artists a longer period of time to develop themselves before they get signed, or make a living without getting signed at all.

In the early days, there were a lot of bands signing up. They told us that they’d like to post their lyrics and tour dates. Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. That’s how we do a lot of our updates. We catalog what people tell us that they want. It’s not super-complicated.

Myspace is not the only success story. Youtube, Facebook, Dailymotion and so on are websites very famous which creators have made huge fortune.

Let see the message from Chad and Steeve the founders of Youtube.