MySpace, Citysearch Partner To Create MySpace Local
MySpace and Citysearch are jointly announcing a new MySpace property this morning called MySpace Local. The site combines Citysearch business listings (including address, photos, menus, videos, maps and hours of location) from a thousand cities with the MySpace community.
Context & Ripple Effects
MySpace has spent two years building out non-social revenue lines — a hyper-targeted self-serve advertising network announced in November 2007 and the My Ads platform launched last October — as it faces pressure on its headline Google search deal, where analysts in February gave low odds of a renewal anywhere near the previous $900 million terms. MySpace Local extends that same logic into local advertising: rather than build a listings database itself, MySpace licenses Citysearch's coverage of a thousand cities and layers its community on top.
For Citysearch, this is a distribution repeat — its listings already powered Ask.com's AskCity back in 2006 — but with a social layer attached instead of a search box. It follows the template of MySpace News from March 2007, which likewise wrapped third-party content in MySpace's community features, and lands alongside MySpace's experimental new Events product, an attempt to close a gap against Evite and market leader Facebook.
First-order effects
- Citysearch's business listings gain a second large-scale consumer surface beyond IAC's own properties, while MySpace gets a local inventory base without funding a sales-and-content operation of its own.
Second-order effects
- Local advertisers now have a route to buy against MySpace's audience through Citysearch's existing merchant relationships, tightening competition for Yelp and for Facebook's nascent local efforts at the intersection of social and small-business marketing.
Third-order effects
- If licensed-listings-plus-social-graph becomes the standard structure, local data owners like Citysearch shift from destination sites toward syndicated infrastructure, and portals compete on community engagement layered over shared content rather than on exclusive databases.
The trend: Aging social networks are licensing established content databases and wrapping them in community features to open new ad categories — local being the next after news and music.