In an online advertising market increasingly dependent on the Net’s ability to precision- target ads, MySpace offers no sure way to hit the bull’s-eye. Google decides which ads to show based on search terms and page content. By contrast, a typical MySpace pageview doesn’t offer much of a clue about anything. What conclusions can you draw when kid A bounces onto kid B’s profile and leaves the message “Wazzup”? That’s why a top-priced Google ad — say, one that appears with search results for the word “refinance” — is valued in dollars per click, while a MySpace ad clocks in around a hundredth of a cent per view. In theory, all those millions of lovingly, often exhaustively detailed personal profiles ought to make it possible to deduce a user’s interests. But no one knows how to do it, certainly not on an industrial scale. —Spencer Reiss —His Space (Wired)
Rupert Murdoch, who purchased MySpace for $580 million dollars, is an old media mogul whose head is not in the sand. Should peer-to-peer idealists worry about the commercialization of “their” internet?
Al Gore tells you to get off “his” internet :)
One thing cool about open-source projects is that sometimes you’ll run across a project page or two whose main content area is not littered with ads. But, these people rely on the generosity of others to keep this going.
It sort of works like a public media station, contributions from people that value these projects and their community-building abilities will give money to see such growth.
Like the public media, it’s not free to distribute anything in a commercially-based capitalistic society. I almost cringe when people call open-source software “free.” In some sense it is (i.e.: free to alter the source code, redistribute, etc.) but as far as the distribution and dissemination (i.e.: cost of hosting… not cheap).
I don’t know much about marketing, but MySpace supposedly has musician’s pages. That might be a place to target a market. Or perhaps the groups (a sort of watered-down forum, imho, lol). :P Though half of those groups don’t seem to have any real point to them. It’s a shame, though, because America’s biggest spenders (aka: teens) seem to use MySpace the most. ;D