Chris de Wolfe: Looking at the bigger picture

MySpace is already the world's largest website. Now, with its expansion into television, it's gunning for YouTube. And, it might just help save the planet, too. The site's co-founder Chris DeWolfe tells Ian Burrell about the long-term revolution

Four years into the MySpace revolution and one co-founder, Tom Anderson, has amassed more than 180 million "friends" while his partner, Chris DeWolfe, has barely 200. Which you might think surprising for someone who has made a fortune, some £150m, from the concept of getting people to network and who, in so doing, has built the largest website in the world in terms of page views, some 60 billion a month.

But DeWolfe, sitting in MySpace's new European headquarters, close to London's Tottenham Court Road, is not at all perturbed by this relative unpopularity. It was right, he says, that Anderson's face and not his or anybody else's, should be the one that appeared on the pages of new MySpace users as their first friend.

"Tom's the kind of guy who's basically grown up on the internet. He's used every classified site – not every damn site – but he's just spent a lot of time online. He feels very comfortable communicating to lots of people online. So, he takes more of a consumer-facing role and I'm more concerned with expanding the business."

DeWolfe, 41, is driving the growth of MySpace across the world and is passing through London on his way back from launching the site in Spain, days ahead of a further launch in Sweden. MySpace now has indigenous sites in 16 countries, each carefully tailored to local markets and in addition to the global MySpace.com. There are MySpace users in every country and the culture is spreading rapidly in China, where a separate company has been established. In the UK, in spite of competition from rivals Facebook and Bebo, the MySpace workforce has grown from five to 100 in a year, in which time the site's membership has increased from 1 million users to 10 million.

Then last week came DeWolfe and Anderson's next big play: MySpaceTV. In what will be seen as an attempt to confront YouTube head on, in an effort to become the undisputed home of online video, MySpaceTV will be a platform for professionally-produced as well as user generated films. Deals have been struck with major media partners including Sony, the US channels Fox and NBC, National Geographic, The New York Times and Reuters. MySpace is close to clinching an agreement to show programmes made by the BBC, which already has a presence on YouTube.

DeWolfe, his slightly greying hair falling almost to his shoulders, poses for a photograph, sat beneath a lurid artwork showing an old hag alongside the words "You Looked Better On MySpace". Here in what he might call the "offline" environment, he presents himself in a sober grey shirt, jeans and black shoes.

Faced with the suggestion that all the social networking talk in London in recent weeks has been about Facebook, he is generous about his rival, up to a point. "It's interesting. They're definitely a good company. Mark [Zuckerburg], the guy who runs it, has done a really good job. Sometimes I think that, in the tech community, people like to talk about the same thing at one time. Two years ago it might have been MySpace, last year it might have been YouTube, and it seems like this year people are talking about Facebook, which is fine. I think it's probably because they've grown more in the last six months. They actually started at around the same time that MySpace did. I think they're around one third of the size of MySpace in the UK, and around one third of our size in the US as well. In the past they've been more of a niche network, and they've just recently opened up their system to people outside of the college arena."

DeWolfe's view is that this is a race that is still MySpace's to throw away. He realises, though, that there is no time to lose, which is why he is spending a lot of time on planes. "[We are] expanding as quickly as we can globally, because there's clearly a first-mover advantage in every country, and I think we've done quite a good job of that," he says. "Putting our flag down in as many countries as we can, as quickly as we can, is extremely important."

Though he might acknowledge that there is a growing buzz in the tech community around Facebook he would not accept that MySpace has stalled and is especially determined to dispel any notion that the site's association with Rupert Murdoch's media empire (following its acquisition by News Corp two years ago for £332.85m) has damaged its reputation online. In fact, he claims most users have no idea of the connection. "I think there was a definite concern prior to the acquisition, but then what we learnt was the majority of people didn't even know that we were acquired. They just want to use a great website. They don't really pay attention to who owns it or who doesn't own it."

Neither is he worried by the thought that the young, creatively-minded types who inhabit MySpace's world, (a vast showcase for every type of musician, artist, and entertainment promoter from the most obscure to the internationally famous), would baulk at embracing a site that is a sister organisation of Fox News. "Interestingly enough," he responds. "If you look at the Fox News channel, it's bigger than CNN and NBC combined, so there are a lot of closet Fox News watchers out there."

In its short lifespan, the MySpace membership has grown older and more conservative. "Obviously, the early users were early adopters, which by definition makes them pretty young. But since then, we've seen a widening of the demographic as it has become more mainstream."

The internet generation is growing steadily older too, he notes. "Those folks are now, if they were 25 [in 1994], they're 37/38 now. Those people are getting more comfortable putting their lives online, and socialising online, where in the past it may have been viewed as more of a stigma to do that." He says that in the past three years the median age of a MySpace user has increased from 19 to 25.

When DeWolfe was in school he "just wanted to get out and start working", he says, but even so his academic record includes a finance degree and an MBA in marketing, which, though taken 12 years ago, was based on "a web content site that had social networking elements to it".

He met Anderson while working for Xdrive Technologies, a company providing free online storage space for files, music and photos. The pair left to form ResponseBase, which sold lists of emails to other businesses as a marketing tool. With California introducing tough anti-spam laws, DeWolfe and Anderson looked beyond ResponseBase and in 2003 launched MySpace, the realisation of their vision for the potential of social networking.

DeWolfe says the growth of MySpace has depended not so much on marketing as on intuition and responding to the wants of the user. In international markets it relies heavily on the local knowledge of the people it hires. "In the US we could never hope to understand the UK market as well as someone who lives, eats and breaths the British culture. The same goes for any other country."

DeWolfe is also keen to develop the idea that MySpace is more than just a place to have fun, that it's somehow a force for good in the world. A series of 20 live concerts over a weekend, under the headline "Rock For Darfur", helped raise money for Oxfam's efforts in Sudan. "I think we've both been pretty impressed with how people are using MySpace for civic good, to make the world a better place."

He is not worried that users might question the motives of the site in involving itself in geopolitical and environmental issues. "There are certain causes out there that we just believe in, that may be a little bit controversial - like climate change - that we've done a lot of promotion for because we believe in those causes. The MySpace position is that we want to make everyone aware that there is climate change happening, educate them on what a carbon footprint is and how they can reduce their carbon footprint."

MySpace is heavily involved in the US political process, arguing that it is promoting democracy. "Every major presidential candidate in the United States has a MySpace page, which means that the next president will also be a MySpace member. Which is cool."

French presidential candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal both used MySpace to promote their causes. "I think one of the cool things is that politicians get into such campaign speak that they almost become dehumanised, and on MySpace there's more of a personal feel to their MySpace profiles," says DeWolfe. "We just don't promote any one politician any more than any other politician."

After returning to California, DeWolfe calls to discuss the launch of MySpaceTV. The launch is widely interpreted as an assault on YouTube and he doesn't dissent. "I think to a certain degree you could say that. We compete on a lot of different levels and video is an important one. We are getting very close to catching YouTube here in the United States on the video side."

MySpace has signed a deal with Sony to show five-minute long "minisodes" of Eighties comedies. DeWolfe anticipates MySpaceTV will also feature almost all the output of NBC and Fox, and content deals have been struck with the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League.

The site has been strengthening its ties with UK media organisations, particularly Channel 4, which allowed MySpace users to develop plot lines for its E4 drama Skins. Film4 is partnering MySpace in creating the first user-generated feature film with the MyMovie MashUp project. DeWolfe says: "We are going to be very aggressively working on a lot of content partnerships in the UK and throughout Europe." A deal with the BBC is "almost done", in spite of the corporation having its own "channels" on YouTube.

"The larger media companies are beginning to understand that the market place is really fragmented, meaning people consume content in a lot of different places. What they are realising is that they can't hoard all the content in one place, they have to distribute it to where people are spending their time, and people are spending time on sites like MySpace so it makes sense to do distribution deals with us as well as with other video sites."

The arrival online of high-quality video content will transform the advertising spend online, first through sponsorship deals and later through television style advertising spots, DeWolfe believes. "Video will be one of the key drivers in internet advertising revenue, maybe not over the next year but certainly in a year and a half or two years we think it's going to explode," he says. "It's much easier to put a 15-second spot in a 22-minute episode than in front of a one-minute clip."

MySpaceTV is "just the tip of the iceberg", one of half a dozen major upgrades to the site in coming months, including the integration of the Flektor system that will give users the tools to easily edit videos. Just as MySpace has become the essential destination for following musical trends, from new songs made by garage bands to the tour news of stadium-filling supergroups, so it may become for film, from home-made clips to prime-time TV shows. All of this will give MySpace a greater stability and long-term relevance. For in the fickle world of social networking, users can move quickly from one site to another, en masse and on little more than a whim.

Maybe that's why DeWolfe keeps his own friends close, allowing only a couple of hundred on to his profile page, where he is known by his nickname "Beez". "It's a convenient place where everyone I know, from all different parts of my life is there," he says. "I know every one of 'em."

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