First-order effects

• MySpace's existing users wake up to a rebuilt site pitched at a younger demographic, meaning older lapsed members are being written off deliberately rather than courted back.
• News Corp.'s social division now competes on entertainment and youth culture instead of matching Facebook feature-for-feature, a narrower mandate that puts its ad sales team under immediate pressure as traffic has been eroding.

Second-order effects

• Facebook faces no direct strategic change — the redesign concedes the general-purpose network battle — which frees Facebook to press advantages like the Bing social search partnership announced earlier in October.
• Advertisers weighing the two networks get a cleaner choice between Facebook's mass reach and MySpace's youth skew, likely pushing brand campaigns toward whichever can prove engagement rather than raw member counts.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, general-purpose social networking consolidates around a single dominant platform while laggards survive only as vertical niches — music, entertainment, specific demographics — rather than full-network competitors.
• A persistent money-losing consumer property inside a conglomerate raises the question of how long News Corp. keeps carrying MySpace on its books, whether through further restructuring, a sale, or a wind-down — though no such decision has been reported as of this date.