Huh. Seems standard business practice – playing vendors off each other – is now a news event, according to Fox, a Newscorp. property.
“We will redesign the pages to make search more prominent,” Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corp. said of its MySpace.com business. “We will auction off our search business to Google, Yahoo, or MSN.”
Should be an interesting auction, just like the fight for AOL. What will the split be? 85%? Way too low. I’m wagering that for the first contracted period, anyway, it’ll hit over 90%.
there’s seem to be a good opportunity for someone to come up with a vertical search site that only does social networking sites. There’s plenty of data thatt’s pretty standard and unique to all social networks, including MySpace.
90% of Google != 90% of Yahoo != 90% MSN. Does that mean they are disclosing their average revenue figures? This is really a partnership with an ad network, not a search engine.
I think they should buy one of the smaller ad networks, one of the smaller search engines, and make a serious go at this. Make something that leverages their users rather than just rebrand Google/MSN/Yahoo.
Rupert Murdoch told the market three times in the last year he was close to announcing the search engine he’d take controlling interest in. Chernin now says going search alone is not a wise move. Somewhere in the trees is Ross Levinsohn who runs the FIM arm of the empire where MySpace resides. I’d like to know what he thinks as his boss is hanging wind socks.
The organization would be foolish to give the job to Google under any terms. Any move to Google solidifies Googles hold as search king into the next decade at least. Make Google advertise on MySpace and earn that 8% they get from Myspace.
A much smarter move would be to partner or buy a second tier and brand it as their own. It seems to be working for IACI. Murdoch has so many online properties to fill it seems ridiculous to outsource something that demands its own branding.
They can redesign all they want. people don’t go to myspace to search. That deal will be crappy for the search provider and it will last until the term is up.
All four previous posts are right on. If you’d like an additional take on what MySpace’s search business could be worth, click here:
http://blog.hipmojo.com/?p=193
Enjoy
How about News Corp letting MSN take a shot; after all, AdCenter gives Advertisers more precision in targeting search ads than Google or Yahoo. Also, I think both News Corp and Microsoft would get along better than with Google or Yahoo’s paid search.
If News Corp wanted to develop their own Vertical Search Engine, they also could do that.
Is it too late for News Corp to get into Vertical Search? No, I don’t think it’s too late. What’s too late for them to do is brand themselves as an general, overall, search engine – but as long as they’re restricting themselves to an area of search where there are not that many players – I see no reason they can’t develop a search service that could be profitable.
Is it really worth all the trouble? I mean from an advertiser perspective does it really make sense to have your search ads displayed to my 14 year old nephew and the like? If I was Y,G or M I would up “bid jam” my competitors to overpay for what in turn will be a massive headache in the long run. Think of the sudden impact of the MySpace user on an advertisers ROI.
Given a 90/10 split and the amount of traffic MySpace sends to Google, do you think Google, Yahoo and MSN made a strategic mistake in not buying MySpace?
OR does …
The value of competitive intelligence from a revenue split with any of the MASTERs (Media/Adserving/Search/Technology/ Engine/Retailers) of the Online Universe outweigh the revenue stream itself?