MySpace, the world’s largest social network, is believed to be launching a new targeted advertising offering dubbed “Self Service by MySpace”. The news of the launch will apparently be officially broken at Ad:Tech today.
The new service will not have any impact on the existing agreement that myspace has with Google for text based advertising and will be initially offered to a selected group of advertisers over the next 60 days. Whilst the service is designed to serve image based ads it will be run on a similar basis to that of the text based Google Adwords network. This is quite a bold/new step in the social networking game, although it is believed that Facebook intend to announce a similar proposition early next week as well. Never the less, MySpace definitely seems to be first to market with this offering even if it is only by one day 
In terms of specific features, the new MySpace ad network will allow users to target their display advertisements by way of geographic, demographic and user interest categories. The minimum spend will be $10 and myspace intend to adopt a set CPC initially for various categories.
On top of this, MySpace are apparently also going to launch an additional advertising option for users that will be known as “Hyper Targeting by MySpace”. As the name suggests this new ad network will allow much more granular targeting for advertisers. It will leverage MySpace’s proprietary technology that builds a detailed profile of each myspace member including specifics such as friends, age, gender, location and interests.
This technology has already been ’soft’ launched back in July with a small but important business user base of companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Taco Bell, Ford & Microsoft.
