MySpace to Discuss Latest Effort to Customize Ads for Members
LOS ANGELES — Members of the booming social network Web sites treat their individual profile pages as a creative canvas for personal expression. — The social networking companies see those pages as a lush target for advertisers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement lands at a delicate moment for MySpace: confirmed reporting a week earlier showed the site's page views falling nearly 20% as its social networking dominance erodes, and an August [[a:1179812|GigaOM analysis argued MySpace already holds the ad-targeting capability Facebook is only introducing]]. Customizing ads against member profiles is therefore both an offensive product story and a defensive revenue one.
It also collides with MySpace's own user-relations record: back in March, profile restrictions drew open complaints from some members, who treat their pages as personal canvases rather than ad inventory. The company's challenge is extracting advertiser value from that canvas without repeating the backlash.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain access to MySpace's stated plan to customize ads per member, with profile pages positioned as the primary inventory.
- MySpace's news Corp-era owners get a concrete answer to the page-view decline: higher-value targeted impressions on traffic it already has, rather than raw volume growth.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, which rivals' coverage frames as still building toward this capability, faces pressure to accelerate its own targeting rollout or cede the 'better ad platform' argument to a shrinking rival.
- Ad buyers weighing MySpace versus Facebook must price in engagement risk — falling page views on one side versus less mature targeting on the other — sharpening competition between the two networks for brand budgets.
Third-order effects
- If profile-based customization becomes standard, social networks' core business shifts from hosting member expression to selling inferred member data, forcing a durable negotiation over how much control users keep over pages they treat as creative canvases.
- A repeat of the March restriction backlash would push platforms toward self-serve and user-tuned ad tools as the compromise structure between monetization and member autonomy.
The trend: Social networks are converting member profiles from expressive canvases into targeted advertising inventory, with MySpace racing to prove its lead in ad customization before its traffic advantage disappears.