How to Value a MySpace Mega-Group
One of the underlying issues raised by Obama's MySpace Mess is just what it takes to build a mega-group on a big social networking site, and how to value that work. I want to get into that here. — I've seen comments about this controversy suggesting …
Context & Ripple Effects
The valuation question lands on a platform already in demographic flux. The Washington Post reported in October 2006 that MySpace was losing its teen cachet, and Business 2.0 followed in December with the case for MySpace as a network for grown-ups — meaning the people joining candidate mega-groups are older, more likely voters, which is exactly what makes their aggregated attention worth pricing.
Against that backdrop, the dispute over Barack Obama's mega-group has turned a fan-built profile into contested property: analysts are now asking what labor goes into assembling hundreds of thousands of friends and what that assembled audience is worth to a campaign. It is one of the first attempts to put a number on community-building inside someone else's network.
First-order effects
- Whoever controls the Obama mega-group controls a direct, unmediated channel to a voter-scale audience — ownership of the profile, not just its size, is the immediate stake for the campaign and its volunteer builder.
- Campaign staff evaluating social-network presences now have to answer a question that did not exist a cycle ago: whether a candidate's profile is an organizational asset or personal property.
Second-order effects
- Other presidential campaigns face pressure to formalize their own social-network operations — hiring or contracting the people who build friend counts before disputes over attribution arise.
- If mega-groups get valued as media buys, the pricing conversation shifts toward MySpace itself, whose ad product would be benchmarked against what organic reach on the platform delivers free.
Third-order effects
- Political organizing is drifting toward treating platform-dependent audiences as balance-sheet items, which raises the unresolved structural question of portability: an asset built inside MySpace cannot be moved if the platform declines or changes terms.
- Volunteer-built campaign infrastructure is being forced into explicit ownership agreements, a shift that could reshape how campaigns use unpaid digital labor at all.
The trend: Campaigns are beginning to price follower networks as owned media assets rather than free byproducts of enthusiasm, with the underlying question of who actually holds title still open.