MySpace. I have written before about this mess. I feel inclined to say more. I was cruising through the site last night. Trying desperately to understand the appeal. Choosing random profiles and seeing how they were built and reading through comments. Good grief, what a cluster.

As a marketer, the idea behind MySpace is there are so many people signed up that if you spam enough of them with stupid offers like free surveys and such, then you stand to make a bunch of money. No doubt. But I think it is getting a bit overdone. Couple of things: I chose 10 random profiles and read through the comments (I know, after about the second one I would have preferred banging my head against the wall). Interestingly 8 of them had some link to a paid survey. The secret is out big time about spamming the comments. How long will that remain effective? Second, I noted that of the 10 female profiles I chose, 5, maybe 6 were all fake. Yes, you can tell. Not sure what the relevancy of that is but it’s interesting that so many profiles are fake.

I bought (and subsequently asked for a refund) a product that lets you build numerous MySpace profiles a day. I also understand that quite a few enterprising MySpace marketers are outsourcing building profiles as well. If 1,000 people bought a profile builder and built 100 sites a day, which is extremely easy (when the product is working), that is 100,000 new profiles added a day. 100,000 fake profiles is most definitely a conservative number. That’s 3 million in a month conservatively speaking. At what point do all these marketers start spamming each other and overlapping their pitches?

I think if you get in, NOW, you stand a good chance of making some good money. But the window is closing fast. There has already been 8 updates in like two weeks for the most popular profile builder. You don’t think MySpace with it’s massive financial backing is not working like crazy to shut this spam generator down? They’ll continue to make things difficult. Maybe not impossible, but difficult. At least to the point where you may be better off just Bum Marketing or something. Building useful blogs. You know, the thing nobody wants to do because it is actually hard work.

How would I work MySpace? I liken it to the days of building splogs. Now, you can spam the web with junk blogs and hope to move traffic around your different Class C’s and all that nonsense OR you can build a blog that has useful information and link to one or two of your websites that also has useful information. Search engines see the value and you get ranked for some keywords. Same with MySpace. Build a cool space. Link out to your blog or website. Make useful comments to your friends to visit your website because you actually have something that they would want to see. Splash Adsense and affiliate programs on the webpage or blog. You should see a nice uptick in traffic. Maybe a few bucks.

Is it better to have 10-15 useful profiles that are respected? Or is it better to build 100 a day and spend time spamming your friends with junk. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there are some guys out there making a killing building profiles and spamming the comments. It’s the nature of the “blackhat”. But at some point blackhat MySpace marketing may go the way of portal building for search engine rankings, where all of a sudden everyone was talking up VRE and authority sites.

I’m just saying to get the cash while you can and be prepared to make a change when blackhat measures may start failing. At some point quality will overcome crap. Ignore the past at your peril.