I read with interest the story on Venture Beat that said yet another U.S. web company was struggling. They sited the quitting of the MySpace China chief executive Luo Chuan as evidence of a failing company.  The general view of why MySpace had difficultly in building a market precence in China and I suggest it comes down to fundermentally not getting the localisation right…. MySpace provided translations of its English-based site into other languages and it invested in building out teams to focus on promoting and selling ads in China. But it appears that this “localization” didn’t go so far as to let regional managers make significant changes to the translated versions.

This is in contrast to Facebook and hi5 who let users recommend their own translations, which helps ensure that things like popular colloquialisms make it in. They also polish those version with the help of professional translators. 

Friendster has focused on translating the site into Asian languages, to help it solidify its market share in the region (most recently, it introduced a mobile version of traditional Chinese). It boasts millions of ethnic Chinese users in other parts of Asia, but it’s not clear if that’s translated to more users in China.

In sum, given MySpace’s existing localization strategy and the trouble it and other U.S. companies have in reaching Chinese users, it seems to me that MySpace could have done well to try and do more with localising MySpace.

Luo Chuan is said to have left to join a Chinese based video startup.

Tags: MySpace