MySpace Will Never Be Facebook, Van Natta or No

Not many of us were expecting Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson to be dethroned from their founders’ posts at MySpace quite this fast, but dethroned they have been, almost six months before their contracts were to expire. Their dismissals come, notably — and I assume not at all coincidentally — before Facebook’s expected surge past MySpace as America’s no. 1 social network, which will likely happen in the next six months. No wonder that, if The Wall Street Journal is right, the founders will be replaced by Owen Van Natta, former COO of Facebook (subscription required), whose unstated objective will be to make MySpace more like Facebook.

Unfortunately, that can’t possibly happen.

Ironically, the problem is that MySpace has a business model, while Facebook does not. The typical MySpace page is filled with big, splashy ads and things that blink; Facebook does a lot of things, but it never blinks. MySpace makes money (even though it reportedly missed last year’s revenue targets); Facebook has yet to make a dime.

And that’s why Facebook is growing in popularity, while MySpace is not.

One reason people go to Facebook is because, relatively speaking, it’s a blissfully ad-free environment. It’s counter-intuitive, but the ads are barely noticeable, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable. Ads alone aren’t what killed MySpace, but in the constant compare-and-contrast that goes on between people and their social media choices, the social net without the blinky ads will always win — even if that’s a distinctly not-for-profit strategy.

So if the mission of Van Natta, or, anyone else who might become the CEO of MySpace, is to make it more like Facebook, the only way to do it is to strip the service of the blinky ads. Even if MySpace isn’t the cash cow that Rupert Murdoch thought it would be, taking away the ads takes away a lot of money, and that’s something News Corp. would never tolerate.

UPDATE: Van Natta’s appointment is now official.