Chairman and CEO of News Corp. (NWS-A) Rupert Murdoch said that MySpace is generating nearly $25 million in advertising revenue and growing by 30 percent each quarter.
He added that revenue from the entire stable of Web properties is nearing $1 billion, and in a short five years will be 10 percent of the overall revenue of the company.
Referring to MySpace, Murdoch confirmed what everyone know that "It's grown faster than we expected. Advertising has gone from basically nothing [when we 
bought the company]."
The majority of the growth for MySpace is now international with the core user increasing in age. As the age demo has increased, it has resulted in more people going to Facebook, although at this times it seems that they use both.
Murdoch did have an interesting thing to say about YouTube (GOOG) which is helpful. One is that he doesn't consider it a competitor in the community sense of the word, but rather considers it something that offers an experience. A weakness in that according to Murdoch, is that because of it being an experience, the users may flee the site when advertising is implemented; which is about to happen soon.
That's an important insight to me. I think Murdoch is right here: the more something is an experience, the more difficult it will be to be an ad platform because advertising by its nature is interruptive - even when it's done as unobtrusively as possible.
The results testify to this themselves, as shown by advertisers flocking to MySpace, but YouTube still not really in the game at this time because of the very reasons Murdoch says.
If you're looking at building up a site based upon an advertising model, it's a good insight to keep in mind concerning the experience side of things. Certain types of businesses are simply much better than others in regard to advertising.
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