MySpace To Announce Self-Serve Hyper Targeted Advertising Network
MySpace will announce plans to introduce a new advertising platform, "SelfServe by MySpace," at Ad:Tech Monday. The service itself will launch to a limited set of advertisers in the next sixty days.
Context & Ripple Effects
MySpace's ad push has been building all year: back in August, GigaOM argued the site already had what rival Facebook lacked — deep member-profile data for ad targeting — and by September News Corp was briefing the New York Times on plans to customize ads for members. Today at Ad:Tech that work gets a product name and a go-to-market plan: "SelfServe by MySpace," opening hyper-targeted ad buying to advertisers without a sales-force intermediary.
The announcement lands inside a dense autumn of platform moves from Murdoch and DeWolfe — the MySpace Platform unveiled at Web 2.0 in October, new privacy controls, a Skype voice partnership, and MySpace joining Google's OpenSocial initiative just days ago — all against confirmed signs of user fatigue, including Australian defections to Facebook. Monetizing its audience more efficiently is the obvious counterweight to that competitive pressure.
First-order effects
- Small and mid-sized advertisers gain direct access to MySpace's hyper-targeted inventory within sixty days, bypassing the sales relationships previously required to buy against member profiles.
- MySpace converts the targeting advantage flagged since the August GigaOM comparison into a packaged product, putting a named competitor on the field before Facebook ships an equivalent.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, positioned in prior coverage as the laggard on ad targeting despite gaining users, faces pressure to accelerate its own self-serve offering or cede the long-tail advertiser segment.
- Ad agencies and intermediaries that currently broker social-network placements lose margin on inventory advertisers can now buy directly, pushing them toward planning and creative services instead.
Third-order effects
- If self-serve targeting proves out, social networks' structural value shifts from page views to their profile-data graphs, making member information the core monetizable asset and privacy controls — like those announced in October — a commercial necessity rather than a compliance afterthought.
The trend: Social networks are turning their member-profile data into self-serve advertising marketplaces, competing on targeting depth rather than raw traffic as they race to monetize before rivals catch up.