Google's MySpace Problem Is Serving Up Unrelated Ads

The problem Google (GOOG) is having monetizing its inventory of News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace pages may have more to do with faulty algorithms for ad serving than it does inherent issues with social networking sites.

That’s the conclusion Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield reached in a research piece Thursday on News Corp. “While everyone is blaming social networking as the culprit for Google’s MySpace monetization problems, the real problem is Google itself and its search algorithms for social networking, ” he asserts.

Greenfield gave some examples of inefficient ad serving. He did a series of searches using the MySpace people search to see what kind of ads he’d get. Searching for “Dan,” he received a series of ads for DNA testing kits. Searching for “Richard,” he was served up ads for get-rich-quick schemes. Search for “Beth,” he got an ad for Pottery Barn bath products. A search for “Dan Stone” returned one link for a “Dan Stone people finder service,” plus two DNA test kit links and one for stone manufacturing. Is anyone likely to click through those ads?

(I tried a few more. Searching for “Zeke,” I got back ads for “Ezekial Clothing,” and “E-Zekial Church Web Sites.” A search for “Betty” brought back an ad for bathroom products. A search for “Stan” triggered an ad for “Stanley’s Optoelectronics.” And explain this one: A search for “Google” brought back an ad for “Expensive Wine Baskets.”)

“We’ll leave it for Google to figure out social networking search, but with 74 million domestic MySpace users monthly and nearly 120 million globally, that spend an average of 240 minutes per month on MySpace, we firmly believe Google will come up with a better algorithm,” he writes. “The size of the revenue opportunity is simply to large to ignore. They are not going to walk away from MySpace in two years, they are simply going to develop a better method for monetizing a massive number of eyeballs and searches on MySpace.”

Concludes Greenfield: “Regardless of whether investors believe it, MySpace has a significant growth opportunity in front of it, and Google is quite likely going to be a driver for years to come.”

News Corp. the publisher of  author's blog.

Disclosure: News Corp. is the publisher of the author's blog.

Comments

[MichaelZZ]

This is one of the most moronic articles I have seen.
Anyone using search engines with: betty, dan, zeke, et cetera are much to lame to have any idea what they are doing.
.....It feels like it is time to take an intellectual shower to cleanse after reading this nonsense!