Things aren’t looking too bad for MySpace right now in the financial department. As the economy is in a shambles, MySpace seems to be one of the businesses poised to overcome it and actually see growth.
VentureBeat is reporting that sources close to MySpace are expecting revenue for the year to reach $1 billion (give or take). If that number is accurate, it would be a significant amount of growth up from a reported $850 million last year. VB’s Matt Marshall writes:
MySpace has been helped by the guaranteed revenue deal from Google, which provides search for MySpace. Also, it uses its own proprietary targeting technology to mine its users surfing and click habits, in order to send ad messaging to its users “at the right time, in the right way,” says Berman.
MySpace knows for example, that it has more active Nascar enthusiasts than even Nascar.com does, Berman said. MySpace also says that 40 percent of all mothers online in the U.S are using MySpace every month. It makes money by being able to target these users with specific offers. Under its myAds program, released last week, local advertisers can pay $25 or more to serve ads to users based in a certain zip code.
Let’s talk about that MyAds program for a moment. Upon its launch, I said, “I’m not going to say it’s the next AdSense, but I think MyAds will be pretty big for MySpace, and even bigger for its users. The ease-of-use that will allow “Joe MySpace-User” to design their own ads and target them at cheap rates is going to appeal to a whole lot of people, particularly those who have had trouble getting Social Media Marketing to work for them.” Interestingly enough, Google just announced yesterday a similar feature for AdWords, which will allow users to create their own display ads with ease.
The really interesting thing is what seems to be an upward trend in display advertising with these big brands offering new services for users to create ads. This is not a new method of advertising by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to be having a resugence in popularity. The aforementioned targeting to deliver relevant ads is the most important part of this resurgence I believe. That’s the biggest selling point for MyAds (obviously Google knows what they’re doing in this department too).
MyAds should be a huge boost for MySpace, but let’s not forget about MySpace Music. The recently launched service provides entire catalogs of music from major labels, and apart from attracting (who knows how many) users, the service also attracted some pretty big name advertisers like McDonald’s, Toyota, Sony Pictures, and State Farm.
MySpace is doing just fine, and it’s possible that the social network might see more traffic as a result of the economy if people are not working and are too broke to go out for fun. Granted they’ve managed to keep their Internet connections, MySpace will continue to be a popular online destination.
