According to BBC (and others) Google and Fox Interactive Media have announced that Google will be providing all search and advertising facilities for MySpace and all of the other FIM properties apart from FoxSports.com.
It’s a deal worth $900m (£472m) – which is pretty sweet for Rupert because he paid $500 for MySpace. He’s kinda got his money back and some on that investment.
Perhaps what’s curious is that it means that Fox have agreed a ‘lump sum’ to sell their inventory space rather than work on a percentage basis. The specifics of the deal seem to suggest that certain targets have to be met, but that still implies there is a ceiling to the amount Fox will receive regardless of their hits.
Its bad news for Yahoo, as they provided advertising services to MySpace, and were thought to be competing against Google for the long term pan-FIM-network contact.
The Google deal also seems to suggest that other Fox/Google tie ups might be in the offing.
Peter Chernin, president of News Corp. was quoted as saying “We look forward to expanding our relationship into many new areas over years to come,”. Whether that means the sharing (read:selling) of technology or other services to Fox remains to be seen.
However I’m pretty sure FIM would welcome a technology partner as it continues to concentrate on being primarily a content and media play, rather than engineering power-house.
I certainly think it’s an interesting opportunity for Google. A proposition like MySpace is powerful because it is a database as much as it is a website. Google’s strengths are traditionally in spidering (flat) websites rather than relational database content – although of course there is a massive cross-over between the two approaches. It will be interesting to see whether relational database search functionality will be exposed to the user.
I also continue to wonder whether Murdoch will take Fox Interactive Media public as a way of raising more money to acquire new properties and perhaps get into the IP infrastructure business (like bSkyb is doing in the UK – perhaps as a test-bed).
The lump-sum deal for Fox makes a lot of sense … There is very little risk. So, even if the kids decide to move on from MySpace, FIM will still make some cash. $25M/month is a big number, and coming from AltaVista, you know that Levinsohn must have a lot of experience doing search deals.
Bad news for Yahoo, indeed. But have you tried the Yahoo/Overture search on MySpace? To put it nicely, there has always been a lot of room for improvement. Hard to believe that they never tried to improve it.
Google must be happy. Not only do they beat out the competition and wrap up one of the last huge deals out there, they’ll also have a base of over 100 million people to develop/refine a social search engine. And in the meantime, they have a ton of new inventory for AdSpace.
Finally, I think the days of spinning off new media companies are over. And if not, we’ll have one more sign of a new tech bubble.
now, if only some of that money would go to scaling the myspace servers
Thanks for the great content , i will be back for sure, just my two cents on relavant topic, most URL shorteners convert long webpage address into short URL consisting of a random of letters and numbers.OF.AI allows you to customize your desired webpage address in such a way that you retain your keyword for that specific webpage. By retaining your keywords in your URL, targeted audience are more likely to visit your site and easily remember your webpage address for their future visit and referral to friends.” />
Wohh exactly what I was looking for, regards for putting up. “Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life.” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.