The good news, from News Corp’s perspective, is that MySpace is continuing to grow. The bad news is that profiting off social ads is tougher than the corporation had expected.
Peter Chernin
MySpace towers above Facebook, LinkedIn, and almost anything else you can think of in terms of a user base. It’s managed to start selling promotional space to app makers, and the position of President of Sales and Marketing was created just last month.
But, as Andrew Clark reports, “News Corp revealed that its Fox Interactive Media arm, which includes MySpace, will miss its goal of an 80% increase in revenue by ‘about 10%’. The division had been predicted to generate up to $1bn.”
News Corp COO Peter Chernin also stated, “It’s still difficult to quantify the economic value of a friend in the social networking space.”
Social networking as a whole seems to remain a sort of financial enigma. AOL’s purchase of Bebo, the various investments in Facebook, and now the possible discussions between Facebook and Microsoft have all been surrounded by a lot of arguments about the true value of things.
Rupert Murdoch doesn’t appear to be the sort of man who enjoys up-in-the-air dollar signs, however. More ad initiatives and personnel changeups wouldn’t come as a shock.
