WildBlueSkies – Trends and strategies in Digital Media

Described last year as HyperTargeting – MySpace has finally rolled MyAds, out its latest attempt at monetizing the traffic on MySpace. The system uses information that members put in their profiles to serve up ads they might actually want to see. According to MySpace, this increases performance as high as 300% when compared to demographically targeted campaigns (Beacon anyone?).
The MySpace ads are charged on a cost-per-click basis (startingg at $0.25), and, like Google are prioritized based on a combination of the maximum CPC rate bid by the advertiser as well as relative click information – advertisers would hence pay less if their ads tend to be clicked on a lot.
While Facebook targets users based on the interests they have put in themselves, what MySpace does is build out a profile of each user based on what they do on MySpace over time, with 1,200 different ways to categorize each user says TechCrunch. This allows you a higher level of granularity in targeting, which goes beyond demographics and interests.
Looks like MySpace has taken the best of what Google has to offer and combined it with what beacon could have been to come up with what could probably be the road forward to monetisation for social networks. It intrinsically reaches out to what is their biggest resource – their users.
Facebook is expected to generate something in the region of $300 – $400 million in revenue this year, while  MySpace generated about $850 million in revenue last year and is expected to touch $1 billion by June 2008 (their fiscal 2008).This however pales in comparison to the estimated $14.4 billion earned by Google with its Adsense  program.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Increasing Share Of Advertising Revenue
2. Facebook Nearly Twice The Size Of MySpace Worldwide
3. Google Net Income Up 27% At $1.64 Billion
4. Is Advertising On Social Networks Working?
5. Facebook’s new advertising strategy – predicting your interests

Filed under: Business