San Francisco — MySpace on Monday unleashed the beta launch of a tool called MyAds, which it hopes to woo fledgling businesses and individuals’ operators with tight budgets to easily create, target and track the performance of their ads to preferred demographics on the world’s leading social networking website.
With the launch of MySpace’s new MyAds service, in which any advertiser can kick off an ad campaign on News Corp.’s social network — between $25 and $10,000 — and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.
The service, at the outset is available in a test phase, also will allow advertisers to decide who they wish to target on MySpace and then track the results of the campaigns as explained by the Seattle based entrepreneurs Bacon Salt:
Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow, founders of gourmet seasonings maker Bacon Salt, went out on an advertising limb. Typically, the Seattle entrepreneurs used MySpace and Facebook profile pages or small text ads placed next to Google search results to promote their line of seasonings. Then MySpace encouraged them to test a new ad service tailored to businesses like theirs, so Esch and Lefkow shelled out $500 for a trial campaign.
To their surprise, blog buzz about their product picked up, site traffic doubled, and online sales jumped 30% over the past month. “We have seen really good results,” Esch says. “This experience taught us there is more that we can do to get word of mouth out there.”
With HyperTargeting, MySpace asserts that there are over 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep tabs on performance through online analytics.
MyAds is presently confined to MySpace in the U.S., where it has about 76 million members.
MySpace gets 25 cents each time a visitor “Clicks” on Internet links build into display ads, meaning a budget of 25 dollars could last until 100 people visited an advertiser’s website.
“This is regenerating the online display market and opening it up to the 20 million-plus small businesses in the United States, millions of bands and thousands of politicians looking for votes in November,” MySpace spokesman Jeff Berman, said in a statement.
“We are removing the roadblocks to entry in the banner ad market. You have the reach you need with the targeting capability we offer.”
MySpace has a different philosophy, says CEO Chris DeWolfe. It wants friends and advertising dollars. And it is working hard to get them both.
DeWolfe said 3,500 advertisers are already using the program, which has been in private beta for the past three months. He mentioned that average advertising spend has increased year over year and that revenue is up year over year, but he would not be more specific.
“This opens a brand new market for us,” he said. “The big difference with MySpace is that we have always been focused on building a real business. The other social networks out there are more focused on either selling their companies in some cases or just building new features.”
Although online ad platforms at Internet powerhouses such as Google allows advertisers buy “key-words” to target ads depending on terms used in searches, MyAds targets ads at people businesses think will be most interested.
MySpace utilizes data provided by users that enables advertisers to send banner ads to social networking community members based on gender, age, location and interests.
“I can spread my message to an audience that I normally would not have access to nor even know where to find,” said independent film maker Blayne Weaver, who was among those that tested the platform before its Monday launch.
“It was great to be able to organize my own advertising aimed at the exact audience I wanted to target — people who liked watching movies.”
The objective is also to make MyAds available to advertisers in other regions as well, although no timescale has yet been specified.
The launch comes in the midst of a sharp deceleration in US internet advertising spending, which rose 12.8 per cent in the second quarter, down from 25 per cent in 2007, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau figures.
MySpace spent about a year in designing a process that it hopes will be as simple to use as Google’s AdWords system for text search adverts, only for display advertisements commonly seen splashed across websites.
It takes about five minutes to begin advertising on MySpace, according to a demonstration.
Basically, advertisers describe their ideal customers to MySpace and the platform posts the respective marketing messages on website pages visited by members with those characteristics.
“It works for anyone from a guy at the pizza joint to a politician looking to reach swing voters,” Berman said.
“This is a powerful marketing tool because you can hit the right people you are looking for at the right time. It is the perfect storm, and with the economy everyone is looking for more efficient, higher return-on-investment advertising as soon as possible.”
Berman, who previously served as chief counsel and staff director for US senator, Charles Schumer, has also tapped his political ties to introduce the service to politicians, especially local ones hamstrung by smaller budgets.
Founded as an online community to share music interests, MySpace now attracts a much broader range of visitors, including political candidates eager to attract younger voters.
MySpace is the world’s most popular online social networking website and had 122 million users worldwide in August and is becoming a significant player in the Internet display advertising market, according to statistics from industry tracker comScore.