With data mobility and smarter devices on the rise, MySpace is expecting the wireless space to yield big returns in the near future, and is shifting its strategy accordingly to team up with operators and handset makers. At his keynote on the last day of Mobile World Congress on Thursday, MySpace CEO Chris de Wolfe said MySpace is teaming with Palm Inc. to MySpace-ify the Palm Pre device, as well as with Nokia for the Nokia S60 series.
MySpace has partnerships with 30 operators, which MySpace helps by encouraging mobile data use. De Wolfe said that MySpace’s mobile user base jumped a full 400 percent in the last year with 20 million users updating the site via handset. In terms of mobile Web traffic, MySpace Mobile is No. 3, behind Google and Yahoo!.
He also laid out some telling statistics:
There are 76 million unique online users for MySpace in the United States, and 139 million users worldwide. Meanwhile, Jupiter Research is estimating that 600 million users will be accessing social networks through their phones by 2012. MySpace thinks it can gain a big share of that, especially in India and China.
In terms of monetizing all those eyeballs, de Wolfe said it plans to leverage the Hypertarget technology. The user base has been segmented into 1,000+ segments by interest, to enable hyper-targeted ad serving.
