From this morning's
FT (Financial Times) (subscription required for
full story)
"MySpace cedes editorial control to users
By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles
MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corp, is close to launching a news aggregation service that will allow its 160m members to rank news stories and headlines in order of importance and relevance.
The service, which could be announced as early as Thursday, effectively cedes editorial control of news selection to the MySpace user base and is the latest example of the company's attempt to diversify into new areas."
The article goes on to reveal that the agenda behind this is to allow advertisers to tailor online campaigns depending on the audience they wanted to reach, with content going through several new channels, including sport, entertainment, health and parenting.
It's a smart move - a revenue stream that's not reliant on Google (Google has paid $900m over four years to provide search within MySpace) and your site's users acting as your editors to filter and rank content - so you get to see the most popular content driven by demand rather than by selection (although the content still of course needs to be created, selected, and categorised - with Newroo, a news aggregation company acquired by MySpace last year). They won't have to pay people to rank and rate news - they'll get it for free, and with an online audience of over 160,000,000 they are not spoilt for choice.
They're definitely getting better at this online game over there at NewsCorp...