Reuters to start financial MySpace
Reuters is planning to launch its own version of MySpace this year - though its community website will not be aimed at teenagers. Instead, fund managers, traders and analysts are being targeted. — Reuters hopes to draw from the 70,000 subscribers …
Context & Ripple Effects
The plan extends an arc Reuters has been building since 2005, when it pushed its video out for mass distribution beyond the terminal audience. Business 2.0 flagged the direction four months ago with its December 2006 look at "a MySpace for grown-ups", and this confirms the bet: a community site aimed at fund managers, traders and analysts rather than teenagers, drawn from Reuters' base of roughly 70,000 subscribers.
The timing matters because MySpace itself is at a turning point. comScore put its November 2006 page views ahead of Yahoo's by about 600,000, yet the same coverage shows teens calling it "so last year," and a rigged QuickTime video spread a self-propagating profile-altering worm across the site that same month. Reuters is effectively betting that the consumer network's weaknesses — churny youth audiences and porous security — leave room for a professional-grade vertical.
First-order effects
- Fund managers, traders and analysts get a networking layer attached to Reuters content, converting a subscription relationship into a community one.
- Reuters becomes the first major wire service to stake a social graph on a professional audience rather than licensing or competing inside MySpace itself.
Second-order effects
- The December 2006 MySpace worm sets the trust bar: professional users handling market-sensitive identities will demand moderation and security controls consumer networks never had to prove.
- If the vertical works, other financial publishers face pressure to add their own member communities, turning subscriber lists into competitive moats rather than billing databases.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news organizations stop treating social networks solely as distribution channels and start owning them — segmented by profession rather than age, fragmenting the general-purpose network model MySpace epitomized.
- A successful launch would mark the wire-service model's structural pivot from selling feeds to operating destinations, with community data becoming an asset alongside the news itself.
The trend: News organizations are building vertical social networks around professional audiences just as general-purpose consumer networks like MySpace show signs of peaking.