MySpace Knockoff Or Racist Social Network? You Decide
It seems not a month goes by without hearing about a social network that imitates MySpace. There’s MyPraize, Muslim Space, and even TruckerSpace. But it seems that a new social network, going by NiggaSpace has infuriated African Americans, who see the site as promoting a word they are trying to remove from society.
(New American Media) During a November interview on “The Playhouse,” a morning show on 104.5 WSNX, “Tyrone,” who would not reveal his race, said he was not anticipating the response the site has received.
“I honestly never thought it would [generate] that kind of attention,” Tyrone said. “You start up a website and you hope to get visitors [but I was not expecting this].”The creator said in the site’s mission statement that his goal was to give the word “nigga” a positive meaning. According to him, he wanted the word to personify images of brotherhood, fraternity and friendship.
The site already has over 10,000 members (not large by social network standards) and seems to already be attracting advertisers. Unfortunately however, this site may not last too long, as some sponsors (like American Express) have removed their ads from displaying on the site.
Although “Tyrone” probably was trying to find a unique way to make some extra cash online, this is probably the worst way of promoting yourself online, as one can tell by the fact that he refuses to give out his real ethnic race and name.
Currently the author is using Adbrite in order to “pay the bills” for hosting, although I would not be surprised if they pulled their ads from off his site. I wonder if they even know?
Whether this will be a footnote on how not to build a social network or how to attract attention, only time will tell. But as far as time goes, if this site is fully functioning (with ads) by March 2007, I’ll be very surprised.
Update: Corrected second sentence.
We should be supproting sites like http://www.afriville.com which gives a positive view of africans around the world
Got to give the creators credit though, it’s brilliant marketing. The page itself is just another MySpace clone, indeed it’s an off the shelf script you often see on SitePoint…there’s probably 1000’s of sites out there like this, but give it a bit of controversy…10,000 might not be huge, but for a small site like this is big.
On the other hand with such bad publicity advertisers are scared away, am pretty sure the site goes against google adsense TOS. Given their pageviews and unique hits normally it would be easy to monetize but from what their adbrite page shows the money isnt flowing yet
I think it has a decent chance considering the attention its getting right out of the gate. But keeping up the momentum might get harder over time.
It is necessary to promote the positive, but it seems that the negative seems to get all the publicity. We see in hollywood, sports, talk celebs. We already know if a disatereous it will sell, bring in more (of what your putting out). Thats why words have to be targeted and put inside people and bring a good expierence or you will never change our nature.
Symo
On th long run anything built on bad publicity cannot possibly excel
Look at it this way, In the long run anything built on bad publicity cannot possibly excel