The New York times has a story being bandied about this morning over the challenges MySpace is allegedly having selling advertising on their sites. Has anybody that’s wondering actually been to MySpace lately? That space is littered with ads. Something doesn’t compute here. Here’s a picture of the first — and last time — I visited MySpace to do anything other than to check friend activity (or the lack thereof):

Forgive Mike Davidson for the use of Alexa stats to make some of his points, but he does offer some hypothetical math:

… There are a tremendous amount of extraneous page views being generated at that place. It’s a factory of unnecessary clicks … the situation MySpace is currently in. According to the NYT article, they are doing about 30 billion page views per month and are not sold out. Let’s just say that hypothetically they are *close* to sold out and they have about two ads per page… so maybe 50 billion ad impressions per month. At a $.10 CPM, that’s $5 million.

At the end of Mike’s post, he updates (in green) that it appears like MySpace is overselling their impression inventory and that explains their multiple pages to generate ad impressions. This is a big problem when a call comes in and asks to buy millions and millions of impressions — that you don’t have.

A couple months ago I received a call from an ad broker who wanted to buy a million impressions on this blog over a short period of time. When I told him that we didn’t have it to sell he seemed to be confused. As if we might be willing to pull impressions out of the blue for his clients and take the money (which was in the thousands of dollars, BTW). Also, when I asked him to send me a detailed list of who would be advertised, he never sent an email. Uh oh.

The stats for this blog are public, there is no hiding from the numbers. At the current rate of traffic and assuming two banner impressions per page and third party stats, it would take roughly 33 weeks to do a million impressions (30,000 x 33 weeks = 990,000).

That’s more than a half-year campaign on this blog to generate a million impressions which personally I think would be pretty darn good exposure, but that’s not a really short period of time. Apparently these big ad brokers look for millions of ad impressions in that same period of time … or tens of millions. If we don’t have it, then we don’t have it and I’m not going to try and manufacture it just to cut a deal. Unfortunately, some others will and do.

Techdirt writes:

Several months ago, we noted that something wasn’t adding up when it came to MySpace. Ostensibly they are one of the most viewed sites on the internet, yet their ability to pull in revenues seems almost pitifully poor.

In addition to AJAX being a detriment to page views and clicks, Jason Calacanis points out: “Advertisers are not stupid, they know/figure out that the page views that their paying for and the clicks their getting don’t match and the CPM rates drop (or never go up in the case of MySpace).”

Talking ’bout MySpaceGeneration, My Generation
MySpace might be the first of many to follow generational gap websites. The site just doesn’t work for me, but I’m in the 30-about-to-be-40 crowd. With ads. Without ads. With more ads. Membership. Non-membership. More pages, less pages. Just doesn’t work for me, sorry. Hmm readers who commented on this last time didn’t seem particularly enamored with MySpace either which indicates I’m not alone in this world of not understanding the huge draw.

It seems to do extremely well in the college age demographic. Maybe there aren’t enough advertisers targeting this demographic on the web? (I don’t believe that). Again, this one doesn’t compute.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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