Microsoft Considering MySpace Ad Deal: Report

Microsoft, along with Yahoo and Google, is apparently in discussions with News Corp. about possibly scoring a future advertising partnership with MySpace. That's according to a July 6 article in the Wall Street Journal, quoting unnamed "people familiar with the matter." News Corp. also owns the Wall Street Journal, by the way. Just throwing that out there.News Corp.'s existing deal with Google for MySpace--which will expire within weeks--has the search-engine giant paying $900 million to sell "small ads" on the site. But given how nobody's actually been on MySpace since early 2007, except for a few tiny bands with roughly 10 fans, apparently the traffic milestones aren't being met. Enter Microsoft and Yahoo, who are apparently willing to negotiate at a time when MySpace is trying to (yet again) retool itself into something other than a digital ghost-town.(And yes, I know--thanks to the original WSJ article--that MySpace apparently attracted 109 million unique visitors in May. That still doesn't come close to matching Facebook's 500-million-plus users; more importantly, once News Corp. started plastering MySpace with ads, it promptly lost its cachet as a destination Website for its target audience.)Microsoft has been involved in social networking for some time. It made a $240 million investment in Facebook back in 2007, and initiatives such as Bing and Windows Live Messenger have focused on integrating information from the likes of Twitter and Facebook. But that's not enough. As the early-June rumors about a possible Microsoft buyout of AOL suggested, any moves that Redmond could make to either profit from social networking--through advertising or capital investment--or increase its presence in the space--via baking others' content into its own offerings--are moves that would merit serious consideration.And I'm sure that, should a MySpace deal work itself out, Microsoft would earn itself a tidy little profit, especially considering that News Corp. will likely be forced to set lower traffic milestones. A few short years ago, the entire landscape looked very different (back then, my MySpace profile picture still had hair); now it's possible to look at potential deals like this as a snapshot of the Web's current state, where previously dominant players in one area (MySpace, social networking) find themselves battled over by the same groups of titans (Google, Microsoft). The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.



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