Thalasar Ventures

After reading Jeff Nolan’s post about the Myspace and Photobucket, I wandered over to Gigaom’s take on the matter. My own feeling is that if you are making money on someone else’s social network that you should be like Elmer Fudd, “Very very quiet.”

Myspace is the 800 gorilla in the space and not having a play for the market seems silly. That said not having an official relationship and deciding that you are going to talk about it in Fortune is a very dangerous thing. Om’s post is a pretty guide one. Stealth intrusion on social network is a tactic, not a strategy and frankly it’s a dubious one at that.
People build steathily on social networks because it’s an incredibly cheap way to acquire customers. But if you business model requires such a cheap customer (largely because you are struggling to monetize the traffic or your service) then maybe you ought to rethink the tactic. The official blog announcement at Photobucket seems a bit whiny really. Guys – the TOS at myspace is incredibly clear. Advertising of any sort is prohibited period. Photobucket like Captain Renault, is SHOCKED SHOCKED to find advertising is against MySpace’s terms of service.
This sort of corporate response when you obviously know that you are violating someone eles’s TOS as your business model is somewhat silly. I also think that calling for MySpace users to email and call myspace is silly but it’s their right. Look you encouraged users to create an ad for one of the largest movie releases of the year and advertise it on Myspace – all of which makes you money and not a penny goes to myspace.com. Photobucket exactly what did you expect to happen?