Online Journalism News

NYC: MySpace makes $25m per month, claims Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch has told an industry conference that MySpace make $25 million per month on advertising.

"It's extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month - almost 30 per cent every quarter," he told the Digital Hollywood conference, in New York.

"Next year we'll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN, we'll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue."

He said MySpace was now worth $150 million of which 20 per cent had come from growth in new markets in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Australia.

"It's gone faster than we have expected, we have had to put the brakes on. Physically just handling this traffic we're going to need a lot more hardware, a lot more servers," he said.

The head of News Corp went on to explain the motivation behind his buying the social networking site.

"Two and a half years ago it suddenly it occurred to me that we were living in a booming economy and print advertising, and for that matter TV advertising, were not growing at the rate they had in the past," he said.

"You only had to look where the money was going, a lot of it was going onto the net so we said to ourselves it's time to move seriously."

Mr Murdoch added that he was not concerned about the prospect of users leaving for other social networking sites, like Facebook, as MySpace could still offer services that could keep people coming to the site.

He added that, after Google bought YouTube, it prevented MySpace access to its content from the video-sharing site. Murdoch said MySpace then ramped up its video element and now had roughly 60 or 70 per cent of the number of uploads that YouTube gets.

"If you look at it [YouTube] carefully it's not a community site. It's an experience and it can be quite hypnotic. But how do you monetise it? If you interrupt the flow of videos with commercials the users will be over to us or somewhere else pretty quickly," he added.

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
google | youtube | new york | australia | france | rupert murdoch | italy | united kingdom | germany | usd | m&a | community site | news corp | social networking site | print advertising | search revenue | social networking sites | videosharing site |

Sign up here for our free, daily email newsletter to get all the latest stories, jobs, tips and more.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.