Was Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Myspace Page Worth $39,999?

August 29th, 2007

I have been reading a lot lately about the Barack Obama’s Myspace incident. For those of you who don’t know Barrack Obama may very well be the next president of the United States. Before he announced his candidacy for president a man named Joe Anthony started a Barack Obama Myspace page to show his support for the politician. The page soon surpassed 160,000 friends which was the largest following for any politician on Myspace. Obama’s team and Anthony were working together to update the page. That was until Obama’s team decided it was necessary to take ownership of the page.

Anthony wanted $39,000 for his time and efforts that he put in over the last 2 years. Obama’s team went to Myspace and asked them to turn over the site. Myspace went along with Obama even though the page was never an official site.

Are you telling me that Obama’s team didn’t have enough funds to pay Anthony for the effort he put in for the last two years? Was Anthony’s sum too high? Hell no! If we do the math Anthony is asking 0.24 cents a friend. We all know that these presidential candidates have millions of dollars in advertising funds alone.

Let this be a lesson to all of us out there. When you sign up to run a page with Myspace and other social networking site you are putting up content on a 3^rd party site. This means that the content can be taken down at any time. I truly believe that Obama’s team could have been more reasonable during this whole situation. Couldn’t they have created a separate Myspace page that linked to Anthony’s unofficial page? The last I heard was that Obama’s team does not have it in their budget to give Anthony any money. Barack Obama’s space: http://www.myspace.com/barackobama

Errol Potok
Check out my personal blog at BusinessShakers.com/errol

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