MySpace In Talks With Google, Microsoft
Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 5:22 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
MySpace is reported to be in talks with either Google or Microsoft for a deal to provide enhanced search and ads to the MySpace community.
Emphasis on that word ‘community’.
Social networks, blogs, and the like, began with the goal of sharing opinions, experiences, and so forth online. They’ve met that goal and then some. Social networks are not just the latest hyped buzzword, but an online reality worth, potentially, billions in ad revenue.
Obviously, both Google and Microsoft know this. (Yahoo! is reportedly less interested. Maybe they were turned off by the process carried out among the Big Three over AOL.) So does Rupert Murdoch, media mogul and now owner of MySpace. (Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace last year for nearly $600 million.)
Even more than Brin and Page, Murdoch knows how to turn eyeballs into dollar signs. He’s been in the business, like it or not, for decades. Political leanings aside, he turned Fox News from a sleepy also-ran into a serious competitor to the major networks. He turned a failing New York newspaper into a competitor of the vaunted New York Times.
When someone like that gets interested in the web, things change.
How they change in detail is anybody’s guess. But everybody is guessing it will mean some kind of deal that solidifies MySpace’s lead as the largest social network.
I don’t know about other affiliate marketers, but I tend to bet with the guy who has demonstrated he knows how to make a buck out of advertising.
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