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Never in the history of the Internet, or the world for that matter, has there been a population with such rapid growth as Myspace. From one lonely inhabitant when it went online in July 1996 , good old Tom (an extremely wealthy Tom now), to over 131,000,000 as I write, Myspace has attracted members like no other site. Currently something like 220,000 new members join Myspace every day so growth is still accelerating.

Except for Youtube and its ability to serve the new Internet video craze Myspace stands alone in the ability to attract and to hold the interest of what is generally a very fickle crowd, the youth market of folks between 15 and 35.

How has Myspace accomplished this? Why is the site so dang sticky?

Myspace is a social networking site and humans are social creatures. While in Western societies many young people profess a strong desire to remain independent most of them by their actions show that they also like to flock together.

Myspace has very cleverly allowed its members to achieve both desires at one virtual location. Members have a great deal of freedom as to how they can decorate and express themselves within their own space, that is their own webpages.

If you doubt this for even one second randomly browse through a few Myspace members pages and you will see what I mean. An entire new online industry has sprung up offering code to pimp Myspace pages.

Shoot, in some of the members Myspace blogs you may even come across a article that I wrote a few weeks ago about the Myspace Generation that has been posted within Myspace without giving proper credit to its author. The original article appears on Myspace Best Friends , which is one of my websites.

But then what is one to expect? The Myspace generation is the same generation where many think that plagiarism is a smart way to complete homework assignments in school. Just ask any high school or college administrator.

But I digress. While being given almost complete freedom to pimp their own Myspace web pages as they like the Myspace generation has a vast number of groups that they can join. So if you are a musician and enjoy hanging out with fellow musicians you can locate scads of groups within a few minutes and join as many as you like. Then you can invite your new group friends to check out your pimped up extremely individualist space.

If you have a passion for skydiving, no problem, share your passion with others who have the same passion by running a quick search for sky diving groups. You can join as many groups as you like. Soon you can have thousands of friends from all over the world across the groups that interest you.

Thus has Myspace (smart Tom and friends) come up with a powerful way to maintain interest in the website for a very long time. Members become quite attached to their own space, as well they might, as many put in a lot of time and money in decorating it. Their private space that is open to the public becomes their favorite space even if it is virtual. From there they can join as many groups as they like, make many friends, and hang out with their buddies.

From a social scientist point of view Myspace offers fertile ground for research. One truly interesting fact is that among the Myspace generation there really is no difference between the virtual world and the real world. Many of them spend several hours a day in the world they have made at Myspace. How over the years this will play out as to the modification of behavior patterns among these people is at this time unknown.

There you have it. Myspace has tapped into the young crowds desire to be independent yet have a lot of friends and cluster together around similar points of interest. Brilliant. And very profitable as the ad revenues from over 131,000,000 individuals at one virtual location must be considerable.

There is one more significant observation that I would like to make about Myspace and Youtube ( more about Youtube soon in another blog ) . Both websites have let the members them selves be largely in charge of providing the sites content. They provide the tools and structure but almost no editorial content and have a light hand with censorship.

This “democratic” form of serving up content seems to be what the Myspace generation folks want. This has great implications for website owners who are used to exercising full editorial control about what appears on their sites. It will be interesting to see how market share shifts between the two types of websites over the next year or two.

If you are involved in anyway with Internet marketing you should have a great interest in Myspace and Youtube. The demographics at both sites are highly juicy to firms with products aimed at 15 to 35 year olds. Those who figure out how to reach large numbers of those independent but social folks who hang out at these sites should do very well indeed.

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