Layoff described by one source as ":massive" are coming to MySpace although there is no official word yet from the company.  MySpace shed 5% of its staff a year ago and laid of as many as 45 more last month. But these cuts will go far deeper, according to TechCrunch and could hit several hundred. Management will inevitably blame a tough economy and plummeting ad revenue, but declining traffic is the real culprit.

Monthly unique visitors to MySpace have fallen from 64.6 million in June of 2008 to 56.8 million in May of 2009 while Facebook rose from 35.2 million to 113 million during the same period. New leadership has been brought in both at parent Fox Interactive and MySpace to turn the ship around with music as the cornerstone of the rebuilding process.

A brief personal message to the head of MySpace Music:

Good luck, Courtney.  This is going to be a tough one and you have many masters,

Now is the time to get the indie and d.i.y. music communityies more involved again They helped create MySpace, and they can help make it relevent again. It won’t cost millions either.  Just equal treatment and a place at the table.

And you don’t have a lot of time before Facebook finally jumps more into the music game.  They really have no choice but to.

Believe it or not, a lot of us are routing for you.

Bruce Houghton

Comments

Various reports call the physical space the “Beijing Cyber Recreation District” and the “China Recreation District,” while a press release seems to identify it as the “China Virtual Economy District.”  Blame it on the product’s unfinished state, or on poor translations, but you get the idea.

What really matters is the scale of this undertaking.  Christopher Sherman describes it as “quite simply . . . the largest virtual worlds effort that we know of and certainly the largest supported by a government.”  In addition to the Chinese government, a mobile operator and bank are involved, and corporations from all over the world are expected to join.

It remains to be seen how successful everything will be, though.  There’s little doubt that the project will be complete by the scheduled launch in June of 2008 – China’s productivity can’t be underestimated.  Yet, as crappy cars and recalled food and toys have demonstrated, the finished goods aren’t always of the highest quality.

Also, there’s the matter of the cultural divide that has hurt Google in China, and a language barrier that, as mentioned earlier, made a press release related to the District rather difficult to read.

Nonetheless, I’ll direct a hat tip to Wagner James Au, and note that I’m very interested in seeing the District go online.

Microsoft Elbows Google Aside For EA Deal

Madden NFL, NASCAR, and Tiger Woods Golf will be among the titles delivering ads from Microsoft’s Massive network. Microsoft needed all the resources it could muster to beat the field and grab the prize, a contract with Electronic Arts.

Reuters said Microsoft had to face down a challenge from Google, which owns in-game ad firm Adscape, and others companies seeking the choice deal. ‘Madden’ and ‘Tiger Woods’ rate among EA’s top-selling titles, the Madden franchise being especially strong.

Though Madden was a key part of the deal, a Massive executive said they needed more than just the football title to make everything work:

“The real issue here is that we’re making a network play. If I just had ‘Madden,’ while great, it would be of limited value to advertisers,” said Cory Van Arsdale, chief executive of Massive, a game ad company that Microsoft bought last year for $200 million.

“We need to build an overall network and this is a major stepping point to have us do that,” Van Arsdale said in an interview with Reuters.

It probably helped that EA and Microsoft have executives placed at each other’s companies. Microsoft’s former gaming chief, Peter Moore, now runs EA Sports. Ex-EA executive Dan Mattick will take over Moore’s job at Microsoft.

Of course, Matt also explains most of the reason for that growth by saying the site has adopted similar techniques as are used by Facebook and MySpace — which generates a mind-boggling 3 billion page views every day — including forcing you to click multiple times to get anywhere. Is that something to be proud of? Not in my book. There’s also a table in Matt’s post that tells a different story — and what I think is a far more worthwhile one when comparing sites: it’s a table of unique visitors at the different social networks.

Over the past six months, Friendster’s unique visitor numbers have grown by about 30 per cent, while MySpace’s have grown by about 20 per cent. And Facebook.com? Over 100 per cent in the same period, and close to 30 per cent in the last month alone. To me, that’s the whole story right there — something I wish Megan McCarthy had pointed out at Valleywag instead of just pointing to Matt’s post. I wish we could get away from the focus on page views.

Comments

Tag:

Rumors started swirling last month about Google’s plans to buy Adscape, but neither company had made any sort of official announcement about the deal until late last week. Although it is speculated that Google will be shelling out somewhere around $23 million to buy the advertising company, the Internet search giant states that the terms and conditions of the deal are officially closed.

Of course, video game advertising isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) such as The Matrix Online and Planetside have partnered with companies such as Massive Incorporated for some time now in order to develop targeted yet non-intrusive in-game ads.

While Adscape isn’t on Massive’s level yet, Google hopes that its prior successes in the advertising field will fuel growth within the gaming sector.

There’s no denying the fact that the 18-24 demographic is highly sought after for marketing purposes. As more adults within this age bracket continue to spend less time watching television and more time in multiplayer first person shooter deathmatches, finding relevant ways to advertise products and services becomes increasingly challenging.

Google is hopeful, if not vague however, about its ability to reach the modern gamer:

We don’t release specific projections but we think there is great value in video game advertising. As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience. That said, we will test ways of successfully implementing this form of advertising and Adscape’s technology will be instrumental in those tests.

It will be interesting to see how Google gets its game on in trying to market to gamers, a group that historically can be pretty unforgiving of anything felt to be intrusive or counterintuitive to an immersive game experience.

Fun With Microsoft’s Anti-Google Rant

Gosh, where to begin?

The full text of Tom Rubin, Associate General Counsel for Copyright, Trademark and Trade Secrets, Microsoft Corporation, offers a good starting point. Keep in mind the content of his “opportunity to speak” about copyright and book scanning was conveniently leaked to a number of news outlets.

His address to the Association of American Publishers, a friendly party to Microsoft’s own book scanning endeavors, criticizes Google in several places. After touting the Microsoft Library program, restricted to public domain or out-of-copyright works, not to mention the New York Times Reader, he tosses in a mention of the Da Vinci notebook exhibit presented online by the British Library and Bill Gates.

It’s enough to make you wonder why Google would threaten not just authors and publishers, but everyone who’s ever created some form of art.

Rubin brings out the chestnut of Google indexing books, including the works of several libraries that willingly agreed to participate in their Book Search. When Google started scanning works in and out of copyright, Rubin said, “Concocting a novel

Adscape is a video game advertising company whose AdverPlay product lets developers place dynamic ads right inside the game and Real Virtual Gateway product enables two-way text, audio and video communication via SMS Text or eMail.

Also, Google has added a column in its AdWords interface that shows an ads quality score, which determines how much advertisers must pay above the minimum bid if their ad isn’t particularly good. They are also making some changes in how the quality score is calculated.

Google has also taken Webmaster Central out of beta and added comments to its Webmaster Central blog. The blog is now the first official Google blog to have comments, as far as I know, probably due to a desire to have a more official place for public feedback than Matt Cutts blog.

Another change: Advertisers can now use site targeting for pay-per-click ads, not just CPM ads. I can imagine some AdSense publishers not liking this one, others thinking its sliced bread good.

Also, AdSense publishers got two 1099 tax forms from Google this year due to some sort of error. Google says they will not need to worry, as the forms may have been printed twice for publishers, but they were not sent twice to the IRS. Still, I’m worried, because my 1099 had my name misspelled! How do you misspell something when the computer that spits out my monthly checks from Google knows the right spelling? Did someone type up these forms by hand?

Finally, Ask.com is doing a funny thing: If you search for yahoo.com on Google, you might see an ad by Ask advertising their search engine. Yahoo is a pretty popular search term, because some idiots use Google for typing URLs instead of the always-there address bar, and Ask is hoping to catch their attention. Craziness.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

This follows Microsoft’s purchase of Massive Inc., a company that provides advertising in videogames. Some analysts suspect Microsoft is trying to cement itself in these advertising fields before competitors such as Google establish a foothold. It is probably also due to the increasing interest in mobile phone content. The Ovum technology consultancy expects mobile ad spending to reach $1.3 billion by 2009, which would be a massive gain from the $45 million spent in 2005.

The financial details of the rumored acquisition talks remain completely unknown. Analysts believe Third Screen Media takes in about $10 million in revenue per year, although the company is growing rapidly. CEO and founder Tom Burgess says the average 2005 ad campaign brought in $35,000, but that this year, a handful have reached the “several hundred thousands” level, with two or three surpassing $1 million. And with almost 200 million cell phone subscribers in America alone, continued growth is expected as advertisers rush to the new market.

Third Screen Media displays about 70 million ads per month. Cell phone ads have generally been little more than text messages up to this point. Banner ads and video commercials are in development, though, and some have already made their way out into the mobile world.

Mobile advertising may not become too abundant, however. “There’s been a hyper-concern that you will offend consumers,” says Paul Reddick, vice president of business development and product innovation for Sprint Nextel Corp. But most people in the field think development will continue in spite of this likelihood.

It looks like more cell phone ads are on the way, and if the Microsoft acquisition of Third Screen Media goes through, the software giant could very well be at the helm of the invasion.

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Technorati:

Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Although Massive is privately held, sources commenting in a Wall Street Journal report believe Microsoft could shell out between $200 million and $400 million for the company.

We mentioned Massive last year and noted how the placement of in-game advertising could reach the highly-coveted young male demographic in a medium that has occupied much of their time in recent years. At the time, Nielsen Entertainment figures cited by Massive said those gamers spend 12.5 hours per week gaming and less than 10 watching TV.

Given the dynamic way Massive’s technology has been described, the purchase looks destined for Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming network. Microsoft can use Massive to quickly switch ads for breaking news on the debut of a movie or release of a new CD by a band.

The deal presents a win-win scenario for game publishers. Microsoft would broker the advertising buys, and share the revenue with game designers. Those designers can facilitate the placement of ads by incorporating elements into a game where ads could be logically displayed.

That ad presentation could be extended from the purely online gaming realm to the Xbox 360 console-only titles. Since Xbox Live users connect their 360s to the Internet, Massive could deliver ads to those console titles over the broadband connection, and update those ads on the fly based on advertiser demand.

—

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | PreFound.com

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Search referral market share is right up at the top of the list, because as always it helps prioritize our clients’ time and money.

comScore does a nice job of breaking it out, but I still think the numbers are wrong, for all practical purposes. Look at your site’s referral data. Probably Google’s lead is bigger than comScore suggests.

The latest study has Google over Yahoo 40-30 or so. MSN’s 14.2% and Ask Jeeves 6.5% are flattering to those companies, but you likely won’t find anywhere close to those numbers if you look at your site’s stats.

In other news, the majority of this site’s search referral traffic is now coming from searches for a well-known “hottie” we posted about awhile back. We’re still waiting to get rich off that Long Tail… but if need be we’ll just turn this into a Scarlett portal, and sell mugs & thongs.

Also, overall site traffic continues to undergo a renaissance due to RSS feeds, direct navigation, and navigation from links on other sites. Search engine referrals now make up a smaller proportion of Traffick.com’s referrals, which I guess means the site has reduced its reliance on search engines. About which more soon.

Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.