August 08 2006

Murdoch and Google: monetise MySpace - and more

There is no more bracing sound in the jungle than two mighty creatures getting comfortable with each other. Google, doyen of search and everything in beta, and Murdoch's MySpace (and more) are now cosying up on the matter of search (irrelevant) and ad revenue (kerching). Why should we care?

Fresh from the Googleplex comes the announcement that Google is to 'power' a consistent search across Fox Interactive Media's suite of online titles - most hip at present being MySpace of course.

The benefits for consumers will be the ability to find things. For Fox it'll mean that people stay on the site longer since after a while even the most torrid guestbook runs out of serendipitous steam, while for both Google and Fox there's money in them thaaar text ads.

Fox, like every Web2.0 company at present, has worked out that the key to being revenue positive is to have zero costs in your business and to make a few pennies on every page view (thank you, AdWords!).

The other benefit of course is that of focus. Never a man to see a revenue opportunity go to waste, Murdoch knows that his expensive, expert sales team is best focused on the global Top 2000 companies - display-type advertising if you like. They pull in the big deals, the full page colour ads that keep the presses turning. Google, conversely, works at the grubbier, micro, anonymous end: millions of advertisers with small, algorithmically-optimised ads.

This then is a case of 1+1=3. Fox gets revenues that otherwise it'd have missed. Google gets revenues it would otherwise have missed. Users get better search and unspecified other services in time and - blessed relief - marketers get a chance to target some ads into the choatic brew of hormones, pocket money and pester-power that is MySpace.

Quote of the day though goes to Google:

"This agreement demonstrates our commitment to bring the same innovation to monetizing user-generated content that we brought to search advertising," said Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development of Google. "We look forward to other opportunities to partner with News Corp. to the benefit of its community."