It just might be sheer coincidence, but Silicon Valley’s Facebook lovefest has brought a certain feistiness to Fox Interactive and its flagship property, MySpace. The largest social network has been rolling out one feature after another, partnering with others where it lacks the oomph, and keeping the unique visitor-page view count inching higher and higher.
At Reuters Media Summit, the company officials indicated that MySpace will roll out “friend feeds,” a feature that is extremely popular amongst Facebook users. What I found even more interesting was Fox Interactive President Peter Levinsohn outlining plans of FIM Serve, an online advertising network, that will first serve News Corp-owned web properties and will later be available to outside web-publishers.
Hey, since everyone is launching an ad-network, why not Fox Interactive. At least, News Corp. (unlike some of its rudderless peers) realizes that is biggest strength is its sales force and can be used more effectively.
Fox, I am guessing will include technologies acquired as part of Strategic Data deal in this new ad-network, FIM Serve. The company had built its “hyper targeting” advertising technology long before Facebook made it a buzz word, and now the company wants to put it to use. It certainly has the web heft - 46 billion page views in October in US alone. News Corp’s sprawling media properties alone could keep FIM Serve humming, as long as the it can deliver on promises, and build an effective ad network.
4 comments so far
12:02 AM PT
Your new blog design is much better!
Yes, Fox seems to be serious with its advertising network plans. We recently got an email from them that they wanted to buy all US-Hispanic traffic inventory and that they are opining offices in Europe and Asia.
4:30 AM PT
i guess by partnering with each other is the most obvious way to gain more traffic. The question is - are the users of the social community service the same? I’ve seen many people with MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and etc. and they are the same person. So will there be new traffic?
9:40 AM PT
When we launched our own friend feed feature a week and a half ago, I knew that it was only a matter of time before MySpace did the same. Granted, our social q&a site only gets 1.1 million visitors a month (around 1% or so of MySpace & Facebook) the news feed seems to be the “killer feature” that social site members want these days.
Pageviews for us are up, other user metrics are also up, and if that moved the needle for a small site, I can only imagine what kind of boost this feature will give to MySpace. From Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation at a conference, he said the news feed feature increased Facebook’s pageview numbers by 50%…if it has that kind of impact on MySpace, the results would be staggering.
9:27 PM PT
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