MySpace, the popular social site that gathers more than 80 million users, is about to make a hit. According to the media, MySpace officials are ready to sign a contract either with Microsoft or Google to implement a search engine on the site. This could lead to a profitability that would definitely compensate the 580 Million dollars that the Australian multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch paid last year for the acquisition of the site.
Since add revenues for MySpace are continuously rising, adding a search engine on the site is no surprising move. It also proves that the site begins to look like a very serious bussiness and it just might ensure it an even greater popularity. People who have a MySpace account don't necessarily look for information they also look for other people, and a search engine would certainly be of help. On the other side, the 80 million users of MySpace, who spend almost 30 minutes per session on the site, averaging around 6.4 visits overall per
month, represent a massive market for on-line advertisement so Google or Microsoft or even Yahoo cannot let it skip their hands.
"There has always been the question of monetization at MySpace as advertising beyond the homepage is limited," says Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at Jupiter Research. The same thing happened with widely-popular free Internet telephony service Skype, which was bought las year by on-line auction giant e-Bay, in hopes for a long term profitability (Skype has an average of 5 million users connected and at least 150,000 new users are downloading the application daily). But while Skype is making money from calls made to regular mobile phones from your PC, MySpace is limited at gathering money from adds.
But there is another glitch: usual on-line publicity just doesn't work for MySpace. Banners, buttons or animations containing adds contradict the very essence of MySpace, which was from the beginning meant to be a personal area, free of commercial intrusions. This is why signing a contract with one of the two rivaling search engines (Google or MSN) is critical for MySpace's future. By allying with Google or Microsoft - to provide the search function and resulting listings - every time a MySpace user decides to do a search, ads can be
delivered.
And not to anyone. Traditionally, the 18-to-24 market (which is the main population using MySpace) is a hard-to-reach market but a very attractive one, since it's made up of those who will later have the money. Convincing them to update their accounts (and thus to make traffic on the site) is an important task that can be successfully achieved by integrating a search engine.
