Last month, we heard that MySpace was talking to MSN and Google about taking over the social site’s anemic search. Yesterday, Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp. (which bought MySpace for $500 million last year) said that the company would ask each of the big 3 engines – Google, MSN, and Yahoo! – to bid on the right to provide search (and serve search ads) to MySpace’s enormous following.
While we said earlier that Yahoo! was already the MySpace search provider, and that their apparent lack of interest might stem from experiencing low-converting traffic, that turns out not to be the case. Danny Sullivan was told by Yahoo! that the MySpace search is actually pumped in by Revenue Science, a middleman “that’s reselling Yahoo’s results.” It makes sense for MySpace to go straight to the source for search; first, it’ll undoubtedly improve the quality of the results, and second (as Sullivan points out) they can probably “get a better deal” in the process.
Pitting the top three engines against each other probably won’t hurt, either. From News Corp.’s perspective, they’re sitting on the high ground; with 85 million registered users (and the second most page views of any site on the ‘net) beckoning for the engines’ business, the so-called “auction” could turn into a bidding war along the lines of last winter’s AOL fracas. And that can only work to New Corp.’s advantage. Although MySpace is a theoretical gold mine, says Chernin, “We’ve just scratched the surface of how to monetize it.”
