Myspace has terrible web design
Over at my personal journal, I recently wrote a post about Myspace’s terrible web design which made the site hard to navigate. I had a lot of trouble just trying to figure out how to update my profile, and how many of us have made our way to a myspace profile only to click out of it because it’s such an eye-sore of information?
As Mike Davidson points out, this very terrible web design is probably why the site actually gets so many page views:
After playing with the thing for a few weeks and writing a hugely ridiculous article on customizing it, one thing has really stuck out to me: there are a tremendous amount of extraneous page views being generated at that place. It’s a factory of unnecessary clicks.
This is odd because it goes against common sense: How could a website become so popular when it’s so hard to navigate? The only answer I can think of is that Myspace is the first of its kind, and reached the “tipping point” before anyone else could get in on the competition. Facebook, on the other hand, is much easier to navigate, but at the same time it’s not open to everyone, so it can only grow so much.
In fact, if you look at the number of page views of Facebook compared to Myspace, you’d see that Facebook, in its own way, is more popular than Myspace. It only gets 18 million fewer page views a day, and considering that mostly only college kids (with High school kids as well now, though it hasn’t caught on as well there yet) can join, 18 million page views isn’t much of a gap at all.
UPDATE: Even more reasons to hate Myspace: The creator, Chris, used to be in the business of spyware:
Selling products online comes naturally to him. Having jumped into the Internet business in the early days, Mr. DeWolfe had become a master of the aggressive forms of online marketing, including e-mail messages and pop-up advertising. After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.
Related posts: Woman sues Google after being banned from Adsense, Interview with Michael Williams
