MySpace, after offering its hyper-targeting platform to large advertisers, today launched MyAds, a self-service platform that would open its social network to smaller advertisers. It is a page out of Google’s (s GOOG) playbook. The search giant had used smaller advertisers to build up a groundswell for its advertising service. MySpace is betting that, by giving advertisers the ability to target users with banner ads based on age, gender, location and specific interests, it can build a sizable business. “We think the sky’s the limit on this,” Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, told Adweek. He seems to think that this will “significantly grow our base of advertisers.”
The company said that the entire network inventory is open for grabs. More than 3,500 advertisers, including small businesses, are testing the system and the ads cost at least 25 cents per click. Given the patchy click-through performance of banner ads, MySpace’s experiment can have long-term implications for banner-type advertising. That said, MySpace’s announcement comes at a time when the advertising market — both online and off — is looking a little shaky because of widespread economic uncertainty.
This is a nice move by myspace; but it continues to follow their stale old act of creating large amounts of revenue on the backs of members and their content.
myspace is easily worth at least a billion, and where is the value coming from other than members/the communities content and activities.
How much ad revenue is myspace sharing with members that generate ad revenue for them ? Are they giving anything back to the community that has put them where they are ?
I am technology consultant, and this summer I became so feed up with the share cropper mentality of sites like myspace that I decided to build an application that shares the wealth that is created with the community.
We also have a stand alone ad service and we have a granular micro revenue sharing service that allows members to share their revenue with Friends, Groups, or Causes.
And unlike myspace and the rest we will be releasing most of the service to the open source community because we know we are not the smartest guys in the room.
I still really have to question MySpace’s ad targeting system. Facebook’s, although annoying, gives me ads based on my interests and my general demographic.
Every ad I’ve ever been shown by MySpace seems to be completely oblivious to me. I’m a married man and I constantly receive a barrage of ads for “hot singles in my area”, etc.
We’ll see how it pans out though.