MySpace’s self-serve advertising program has been off to a promising start

October 12, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Today, MySpace is providing new details about the progress of its existing self-serve advertising program, called myAds. More than 3,500 advertisers of various sizes have already signed up, including musicians and small businesses in various industries, according to the News Corp.-owned social network.

MySpace launched myAds in late July, and it left beta testing in September; it has been expected since last year.

The service’s revenue goals were passed in the first week that it went live, MySpace says, with a client base has been growing 200 percent since it left beta. I don’t have any hard numbers, but it all sounds quite promising.

MyAds uses existing MySpace’s ad targeting technology, called “HyperTargeting,” where the company matches user information to automatically decide which ads will appear next to which users. This helps advertisers reach the right consumers more efficiently than an untargeted banner ad. An advertiser sets a cost-per-click (CPC) price based on its desired targeting from among 1,100 “interest” categories. Pricing is set at a minimum of $0.25 per click.

Ad campaigns cost between $25 and $10,000, and use standard ad units as specified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Advertisers can create ads using pre-built templates or upload their own. MyAds includes an analytics service that shows ad impressions, number of clickthroughs and current cost of a campaign.

For example, one interest category is “videogame,” — if MySpace data shows a user is into video games, a video game creator’s ad might run next to them. These interest categories are matched with more general information about users, like age and location.

While young, this is another promising way for MySpace to make money. The social networking site is already among the brighter lights in News Corp.’s traditional-media-heavy portfolio. “MySpace is one of their BEST-performing assets right now…MySpace is doing great,” says one analyst. The company didn’t quite meet its $1 billion revenue target last year, but the word on the street is it came relatively close — making it the highest-earning social network (that I’m aware of) by far.

[Extra credit: Find the image of Borat in the screenshot, above.]

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Maybe I'm being short-sighted here, but at 25 cents a click minimum, and sending people to myspace profiles - how can there honestly be any decent ROI there?? I'm just not getting it.
  • 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.
  • They are going to have to drop that minimum for a lot of advertisers. It would be akin to Google Adwords setting a minimum of .25 cents a click on ads in the content ads. Most advertisers know that unless they are in a very profitable industry, that is just no worth the price.
  • First Row, 4th Column.

    I think this is a good move for MySpace to find additional forms of revenue. My concern would be the viral effect of an ad being too successful and driving a small band into bankruptcy over money owed to advertising networks. Am I reading this wrong?
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  • nice i have used myspace ads for a while its not bad
  • thanks useful infomation there on myspace ad platform