MySpace Expands to Russia
U.S. MySpace, the social networking site, announced October 15, 2007 the arrival on emerging on-line markets of Brazil, India, Poland and Russia. But attaining this purpose won’t be easy for MySpace, as it will have to fight the local portals for popularity. The losses could be suffered at first, MySpace leadership speculates.
Owned by News Corp, U.S. MySpace is willing to push worldwide, having earmarked Russia, Brazil, India and Poland for expansion and planning to launch the sites in local languages there. The company that started with the developed markets of online advertising currently stakes on emerging markets, seeing the grand potential in them.
The new expansion could be challenging. "We initially launched in countries where we could make money, as they had a developed online advertising market. We are now moving into countries that are at a much earlier stage of development. Russia, for example, does not have a huge online advertising market. But the time to go in is now, when we can capitalise on the growth in these markets," said Travis Katz, head of MySpace's international operations, as quoted by The Financial Times.
MySpace is a social network. It covers about 18 percent of the Internet users in the United States but yields to the local nets in Europe. It is rated the sixth of the English-language Internet resources in the world.
As to the emerging markets, Google’s Orkut dominates in Brazil and India, Poland’s Grono.net has over 1.3 million users, while in Russia, we prefer LiveJournal or MoiKrug.ru.
MySpace set to developing the local sites roughly a year and a half ago, having created 24 sites in 12 languages over the period. Its sites in Russia, Poland, Brazil and India are expected in the nearest four months.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 16, 2007
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