Summer Budget Travel Tips from Gadling

AOL Money & Finance

Rupert Murdoch loves MySpace, but is it paying off?

More

Rupert MurdochDoug McIntyre wrote this morning that News Corp (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace.com will be challenging Facebook in the social networking space with its new open-source platform. This means anyone and everyone with programming and/or web knowledge will be able to wrap their hands around MySpace's hundred-million plus registered users and create applications and useful features that users of the social networking site will love and use -- and will keep them coming back more often for longer periods (known as "stickiness" in the web universe).

Although Rupert Murdoch is now touting the growth in MySpace since News Corp bought the web property two years ago, I still see no solid figures on how the property is being monetized and how profit growth is happening. Yes, Murdoch says that social networking has become "explosive" in the near past. That is very true, and it's something I noted in a post on Facebook yesterday.

MySpace and Facebook may be garnering a huge slice of eyeballs these days, but are they monetizing that traffic? What are page views and visitor counts if little to no 'valuable' revenue is being generated? Some would say all revenue is valuable, but I disagree. If irrelevant ads show up on web pages, they count as being viewed (an "impression"). Does the viewer do anything with this "impression?" Is this growth being measured?

Google
(NASDAQ: GOOG) has made a fortune by discovering how to properly do this. While Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) may be a larger property in terms of overall usage, its revenue pales in comparison to Google's. Again, I ask, are more page views and visits the answer, or are more valuable visits the best way to go?

When I hear Murdoch spinning tales like referring to the growth of registered users from 90 million to 188 million, I have to ask, "So?" Although MySpace wisely signed a partnership agreement with Google (which is serving ads on the site and sharing revenue with MySpace), there are still unanswered monetary growth questions. If everyone on earth visited MySpace but ignored all the ads (or clicked on them, then clicked away), what is the value being lost? Huge.

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA-223.328,280.74
NASDAQ-49.201,796.52
S&P 500-26.91896.42

Last updated: July 04, 2009: 07:54 PM

BloggingStocks Exclusives

Hot Stocks

DailyFinance Headlines

Latest from BloggingBuyouts

TheFlyOnTheWall.com Headlines

BioHealth Investor Headlines

WalletPop Headlines

My Portfolios

Track your stocks here!

Find out why more people track their portfolios on AOL Money & Finance then anywhere else.

BloggingStocks Partners

More from AOL Money & Finance

WalletPop Headlines