MySpace is Free Space

Emily Riley | June 21, 2006, 03:31 PM

The Wall Street Journal wrote up MySpace today with a handy tip for timid advertisers. The article cites Disney's recent Pirates of the Caribbean campaign as an example. Like many other advertisers, Disney is afraid of banners running across other personal profiles in case they end up advertising next to porn or other scandalous content. To avoid this, they opted to post a (free) profile of their own, and invited visitors to check it out. Like other advertisers on this bandwagon, Disney is apparently not looking for volume, but WoM buzz, since their profile has only 1060 friends right now.
This is not a big consolation to MySpace, who doesn’t get much out of the deal (save a few safely placed media buys in this case.) To gain some sorely needed banner revenue, MySpace is opting to add edited content to the scads of profiles and turn into something closer to a real portal. The edited content probably won't near the volume of impressions on the CGM any time soon. Sounds spookily familiar to a long time problem real portals face. Real portals have a lot of wacky content too, in the form of emails. Not very many advertisers are excited to pay CPMs for that content either. Some portals turn to network ads and behavioral targeting to fill the void. Maybe Myspace will too.