In April 2006, MySpace opened a London office to roll out localised sites across Europe, hoping to repeat its phenomenal US growth. Since then, it has attracted 28 million monthly European users and launched a YouTube rival, MySpace TV - but Facebook in the UK has grown 14 times faster and, anecdotal evidence suggests, is luring some members away. paidContent:UK editor Robert Andrews asked MySpace’s London-based SVP for European marketing and content, Jamie Kantrowitz (a native of LA), how to build a social media empire in the 27-nation bloc whilst keeping the upstart down.

So how’s it going for you over in Europe and for MySpace at the moment?

Our European expansion’s gone really well. We opened our offices here in April of last year and, since then, have rolled out sites in the UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and with a couple more to come. It’s been really, really good - we have about 11 million users in the UK and still growing very strong and are really building our businesses out in the other countries in Europe, moving in to focusing on the continent a little bit. It’s been really interesting to take a global network and localise it as well and you really see the exciting nature of the fact we have this really, really large community that kind of exposes global culture and people in local markets but, at the same time, have local sensibilities about them.

What are the particular challenges in localising a site like MySpace in Europe, which is so diverse?

It’s less so a challenge and more so learning. One of the great things is that it differentiates itself from other social networks in that way, because we have users in every country and a lot of users in some of those countries. As far as localisation, if you think about a community, a community online is also a reflection of what you do in your everyday life, so sites, in and of themselves, as they add more people, they become more local because the content is somewhat user-generated. You do realise that people who like social networking in any country sort of like it for the same reasons. In some countries, there are communications that are more intrinsic in the internet. For example, France is very big into blogging, Germany is actually quite mature in community and Italy loves video - so there are trends to how people are communicating online. I think what’s interesting about MySpace is those countries is that those countries have local communities that might occupy one aspect of that; what’s interesting about MySpace is you can kind of communicate in any of those ways on MySpace. It’s been exciting to watch that unfold and people discover that in a way.

Of the 11 million users that you have in the UK, are they people using the UK site or are a lot of them still using the old myspace.com?

Most of them are now on the UK site, absolutely. We’ve definitely seen, over time, people adopting to the site of their own culture and now most people, when they sign up, they sign up to their local MySpace—which is really exciting for us to see because that’s definitely something that’s shifted over time.

Are you seeing any different usage habits, like the lengths of time that people visit the site for? Does that vary, like between the UK and the U.S.?

Some of those patterns are, in fact, different. The time that people spend on social networks might have to do with how old are a lot of the people using the network, what are they using it for in their everyday lives? I think social networks start to assume a sort of personality in and many people now, even in the UK, are on more than one. We do definitely see some variation in the different countries of time ... (but there isn’t) one characteristic that stands out that’s fundamentally very very different in a country versus another country that I can think of off the top of my head.

What’s the biggest revenue driver for MySpace in the UK or in Europe, and does that differ from the main site?

Our business model globally is fundamentally based on advertising. (We’ve been) advertising in search and now we’re moving in to the mobile space as well, so considering that to be a new revenue stream. And that’s definitely the same across the board as well.

I was wondering how much MySpace UK was contributing to overall revenue.

I can’t actually make a comment on revenue because we don’t comment on our revenue as a News Corp. policy.

Maybe you have relationships with content owners or brand partners?

Definitely. The UK site has a lot of partners and relationships that we deal with on both content and commercial that are quite local. We’ve done some really interesting stuff with Channel 4 this year around Skins, which is the new favourite teenage television show. We’ve done some really great integrated cross-platform community building around the show and we integrated the show pretty deeply in to MySpace. (We have done) a bunch of work in our independent film section, for example, with the UK Film Council, with the London Film Festival, with Edinburgh Film Festival. Obviously we have a lot of creatives that are using MySpace and publishing communities there and building content there. In the UK, we really work directly with a lot of the organisations and festivals that filmmakers and writers and musicians are living and existing within.

We have partnerships with magazines from Dazed And Confused to Marmalade, we sponsored the Kerrang Best New British Band award. So in media partners that are relevant to more UK pop culture, we definitely are working pretty deeply with a lot of significant media partners. Right now, we’re building MySpace TV in the UK, building out our brand channels, (we’re not ready to announce) some of our partners there, but you can definitely expect to see a mix of irreverant, very MySpace, entertaining global content and local, UK-centric video content there as well.

And then, as far as artists go, we have over a million (using MySpace Music in the UK). It’s been a really interesting property for us to continue to build on. One thing I’ve seen from moving from the U.S. to the UK is the appetite of a British music fan is actually kind of incredibly different in nature, normally, from an American one. You see so often, so many people love a band form the time that they’re very, very small up until they may grow in to something that’s very large. I think that there’s a great loyalty to music here in a way that actually doesn’t exist in the U.S. I think that’s definitely reflected in MySpace Music in the UK It’s become really important to ... create opportunities for bands and work with major labels and work with partners to do exciting things around building audience for artists. The music aspect of the UK certainly reflects a country with a rooted and deep love for music and rock ‘n roll and how that ties in to culture and society here; that’s definitely been something we’ve seen as MySpace has grown here more locally which has been really compelling.”

It has had a pretty revolutionary effect - nowadays, it’s cooler (to be in to a band you found via a social network that) only one or two people have ever heard of.

MySpace, as a company, we’re not really out there to tell you what’s cool, we’re just making things available for you to discover and that idea of discovery doesn’t really change. Exactly what you said - (it’s cool to like) a band that nobody else loves yet - that’s very much how it happens on MySpace; you go to a friend’s page who might be a real music lover and you might always be checking out what bands he or she likes because they always know what’s on the forefront. That idea of music discovery is really alive and well on MySpace. Over the course of the last few years, not only in the UK but globally, music channel and distribution became a lot bigger but a lot narrower - I think one thing that MySpace has really made an impact on is allowing people to discover all of the music that they like, and maybe things that they used to like that they forgot.

MySpace is owned by News Corp., which has plenty of clout in the U.K, - it’s got a few newspapers in the News International stable like The Sun or The Times (but you don’t appear to have created any opportunities to work with those sister companies - why not?).

One thing that we see - MySpace has become this place where people go to discover things that they like in pop culture, it’s kind of a reflection of what’s going on in real life, and so oftentimes the newspapers, if there’s an article on someone that has a MySpace page, mention that they might have found something on MySpace. That’s purely an editorial thing and that actually happens in a lot of different editorial pages, not just in the News Corp. ones.

We don’t have any formal relationships with the papers even though we’ve definitely talked with them about (building out their) community and how we can potentially work together in video or in MySpace TV. We definitely are in dialogue with one another, but no one has a formal partnership and, certainly, editorially, they’re not really writing anything that’s much different about MySpace than everyone else is or isn’t.

So The Sun built MySun independently but you were liaising with them, advising them?

No, they did that independently. We didn’t advise them on MySun in any formal way. They saw MySpace and thought it would be a good idea to build some community features into what they do.

How about further synergies? You’re now in the same stable with the Wall Street Journal; do you see any opportunities for relationships there?

Unless the young generation magically becomes very, very interested in the financial movements and markets of the world, I can’t think of a direct one. The News Corp. companies actually operate relatively independently of one another. We actually work a lot more with the entertainment side of News Corp., more so, like the studios and television shows, and we’re quite content-agnostic - if you go on MySpace, you’re just as likely to see a Universal Pictures movie as you are (one from Fox). (We have) a pretty significant content-agnostic mentality, that’s what our site is, it just reflects what people like.

MySpace TV launched in June. How’s that going and what are you going to be doing with it in Europe?

We had really explosive video growth and so what we wanted to do was just create a better platform for not only our users to upload and share videos with one another but that our special partners who are already living within MySpace have a place to create these video experiences. What you’ll probably see from us in future is a similar model to what the U.S. is doing - we’re looking at content partners from very big, premium content to picking out some of the talent that’s rising up out of community, and things in the middle - a lot of independent creatives and niche channels and things like that where we’ll work with people who really produce the best and brightest in that editorial and allow them to have a channel. MySpace TV has actually rolled out in all of our countries; in Europe, we’ll probably start adding more brand channels and content partners to it to complement the user-generated aspect to it as well.

Do you have any partners so far, can you say who you’re talking to?

I cannot, but we’re talking to all the major media companies, we’ve already solidified some great partners in music and are looking in to sports. We want our brand channels to really reflect what we think our audience wants,  (it’s not really about building the biggest catalogue of video).

So are you going for original content? One of the things one of your competitors, Bebo, is doing is rolling out a son (or daughter?) of Lonelygirl15 in KateModern. Do you think you’ll go a similar route with new commissions?

There’s always the possibility of it. A lot of times (when that happens), it happens organically or happens because the audience has discovered something and it’s growing out of the mass of the community. Obviously we’re open to finding or identifying original content opportunities - if something is interesting, absolutely, if it makes sense, we would get involved. We are doing MyMovieMashup so, in one way, we are actually doing our own, much larger project. MyMovieMashup is the world’s first user-generated movie and it’s in partnership with Film4 and Vertigo. We’re in stage two, we’re about to start casting it. We did a director search where short film makers could upload their videos to MySpace and over 800 credible festival short film makers entered… having elements of that movie being delivered and interacted with by the community. So, in a way, we’re producing a very, very large-scale piece of original content, which has been really exciting so far. We identified the director and one of his scripts and now we’re about to start casting it ...  in video booths all over England, on MySpace (you’ll be able to upload your videos) and audition and in the traditional casting ways. We’re going to take the community through the process of casting a movie and all the elements that go in to it and let them participate in the creation of something.

So you’re very much (trying to use the community that you have) and can benefit from, not just doing direct deals with media companies to get big shows on the website?

Yeah, I absolutely think so. The ethos of MySpace—and what’s great about it and has always been part of its sensibility—is that, as much as we might do a project with Channel 4, we still feature bands that have 600 friends. The grassroots, voice-of-the-people element on MySpace is very alive and well. One of the things that we do at MySpace often is not only think about what kind of professional content partners that we can do groundbreaking, interesting programmes with but also how do we provide our communities and build audience and put their lives online at MySpace? That’s something that we value and has always been very important to us. It is just as important for us to come up with projects that allow our creative community to get involve with something and provides opportunity as it is to bring entertaining relevant content to the site that our users want to interact with; it’s a different aspect of the site.

Because of the enormous user base that the site has, not only are there so many ways you could use that but do you also think it’s kind of a foil because exclusive content seems kind of difficult to get? (Not many creators want to) distribute their content exclusively with one channel. When Bebo was talking about launching KateModern, we all thought it was going to be kept just on Bebo itself but what’s actually transpired is that it’s getting hosted on YouTube and many other sites because these videos are embeddable. So their business model is to have deep-rooted brand sponsorships within the content itself.

That’s going to be something that’s very much the way forward from both the distributing platforms for that content - like YouTube and Bebo and MySpace - and the people who create it. I definitely (think there’s value in) doing something exclusive around something specific with a company, but, in general, one thing that we’ve seen and one thing that the media business is facing is the demand of putting content wherever it is that people are living their lives… whether that’s in front of a television or on a social network or on a video website; or they don’t really have time to do any of it so they record it and then watch it on their DVR. It’s less about the exclusivity of it; it’s about providing the content creators lucrative and meaningful ways to continue to reach their audience in areas that can entertain them. Just because Bebo or YouTube does a deal with the BBC, isn’t precluding everyone else from doing a deal with the BBC, I don’t think that’s in the interest of any of us. These new distribution platforms are much different types of distribution platforms from one-to-one broadcast, what makes those partnerships interesting is not just big catalogues of video but how you’re leveraging the idea that you can now interact with something that you love and the people that created that in a way that you kind of never have before.

This lack of dependence on exclusivity and this proliferation would mean that, hypothetically, Bebo’s KateModern could appear on MySpace TV - what would you think about that, are you talking to them about that?

No, we’re not talking to them about it, but, in theory, it’s not really something that… Every media creator sometimes does bespoke projects as partners where there are exclusivity terms to it. But I think you’re right in that the way that content is now viral and applications and widgets and embeddable videos… fundamentally, networked distribution and distribution off-platforms is something that you actually can’t control exactly. You can control it to the extent of deep branding, if that’s what you want to do, maybe time-windows partnerships to try to attract audience to the campaign, but the same content, in some ways, is what you can discover on MySpace or on YouTube or on Bebo.

Just a thought about MySpace TV - (it isn’t branded with) the UK flag in the same way MySpace is, but all the content seems to be UK-centric anyway, so I guess you are using geo-filters on the IP address to give me specific content even though it doesn’t look like I’m at a UK site?

Some video, obviously, in every country is geo-blocked. We have some content in the US that you can’t access in the UK or in Europe, for example, based on the deals that we’ve negotiated with certain content partners, which is pretty standard. MySpace in the UK is programmed with more relevant content to the UK, MySpace TV is in the UK as well. I don’t know if people in England want to see as many spoofs of Hillary Clinton as people in the US do!

Is there a risk that MySpace TV will cannibalise the joint venture that News Corp. has with NBCU on the supposed “YouTube rival?” (Ed. note: it’s now known as hulu.)

I don’t have any specific comment on that. That company right now is a US-focused venture, so I can’t really say about further plans to internationalise it.”

One aspect of social networking in the UK at the moment is the rise of Facebook. It’s seeing massive growth - a 25 percent increase in unique users in June, 2,146 percent year-on-year growth versus 149 percent for MySpace (comScore figures). Some users are upping sticks and leaving for Facebook, some of these being people people who have only just got online and maybe MySpace was one of the first sites that they got in to. There’s a heck of a critical mass behind Facebook now - has the MySpace bubble burst?

I think Facebook’s doing a really fundamentally different experience than MySpace - it’s more of a social software technology company, while we’re still fundamentally based on self-expression and culture and community. I definitely think that, for a certain type of person, those two experiences could diverge and they may choose that one suits them more than the other. Facebook is a fraction of the size of MySpace, like in the UK we’re still twice as big as them, we’re still growing at a really nice pace, we’re still a lot bigger than them in the US.

From an industry perspective, it’s always great to have other companies in your industry start growing and emerging because what it’s actually showing is that social networking is not a fad, it’s actually truly something that over 250 million people are doing in the world in many, many countries and it’s going to be a sustainable business and it’s fundamentally marking a shift in the way that people communicate. Anecdotally, I don’t really see having Facebook and MySpace and Bebo as any different from having Yahoo and other free emails. Every social network has a personality. In fact, if you look at a lot of the statistics, there’s quite an overlap of social networking people. Social networking, from a global perspective, is not fully mainstream in the way that maybe using a portal is, but certainly it’s growing at a pace that has really been unprecedented. For us, we stick to our own business - we offer a much broader and much different set of functionality than Facebook does. Facebook has a great sense of social software and technologies; MySpace has a special and unique relationship with pop culture that I think will define us as being very different from all of the social networks, just as every social network has its own personality or strength.

As far as its growth, it’s just opened its network up, of course it’s going to be growing really fast right now. It’s a very viral, very engaging piece of technology. I don’t think that necessarily means that it’s going to kill every other social network. Our strength has always been about culture, community and also self-expression - someone’s MySpace page is much more an expression of their identity and what they love in their life than a Facebook page is, or maybe another social networking page. That being said, if you look at a person’s Facebook page, there are details about a person’s life that you might not be able to see (on a MySpace page). I wouldn’t say our only strength is on pop culture and our content but, certainly, I think the creative and self-expressive aspect of MySpace is a much different experience from any social network, not just Facebook.

(It’s a reflection) of how society works in a way. There’s definitely a place for everything. If you drill down further in to niche social networks that are very good businesses - LinkedIn is amazing at business networking, Bebo skews a little bit younger, A Small World is very small but niche to travelers, Facebook started with this idea that you could get in touch with people that you used to know - MySpace, what it’s known for, is that it’s about self-expression and creative and community; it’s human and has that cultural aspect to it. If anything, it’s exciting to see - you’re seeing growth from social networks across the board, even niche social networks, you’ve seen them grow a lot of late, which just indicates that more and more people that have never done it are coming online.

Do you see any particular features of rivals that you especially admire, not just Facebook? Do you think they’re doing anything that’s particularly cool or interesting?

I don’t know if you consider Last.fm a social network; I love Last.fm…

One of the things that has (driven traffic to Facebook) has been the opening up of their platform with Facebook Apps. Is there any likelihood of MySpace opening up its underlying platform any further, issuing APIs?

On MySpace, actually there has always been a sense of openness, applications - the difference is, Facebook is formally doing it with companies. We will continue to allow people who have widgets and tools like that to embed in to the site as long as they’re not violating our terms of service. There have been examples of companies who have created MySpace widgets that violate and we take them down but very, very, very few. Some of the companies that we’ve now acquired actually started as, basically, widgets and tools that people were using on MySpace - for example, like Photobucket. What Photobucket is, or was, on MySpace is essentially one example of ... ideas that are being developed for Facebook right now. It’s definitely interesting; we’ve been actually doing it for a while, just not in necessarily as formal a way.

You have something interesting mobile things going on?

(We signed an exclusive deal for MySpace Mobile) with Vodafone. It’s early days, especially in the UK. It’s going really well, we’ve seen a really nice build-up in subscriptions. Right now, it’s basically “take your MySpace with you”. Now you can have it anywhere, you can add friends to your profile, you can send messages, you can post comments. So far, it seems to be working really well. We’ll be rolling it out in a much bigger capacity on other carriers all through Europe over the course of the next year; it will be really interesting to see how that takes. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a couple of years, people are using MySpace on their mobile more than they could be using MySpace on their computer. You’ve seen some of the handsets that are coming out, they’re like pocket computers!

Is there a particular strength or opportunity to do MySpace wirelessly in Europe than there is in North America?

Definitely the mobile user here is a more advanced one. I definitely think that we’re excited about mobile in Europe. It’s a place where the early adoption really happens and the US has followed suit so I do think that there’s a lot of potential for us in mobile.

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