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Search and destroy - December 3, 2007

MySpace is going to experiment with compiling an advertising-friendly collection of the user-generated videos on the site to see if it can wring some dollars out of all those pet videos, Alley Insider's Michael Learmonth reports today.

Speaking at the UBS media conference, Fox Interactive Media chief revenue officer Michael Barrett said, "We'll take a look at the most popular videos, have eyeballs on them to make sure they're clean, and add them to a cue for advertisers to consider."

Barrett called the effort "experimental," noting that MySpace doesn't it need for it to succeed because it still makes money from UGC by selling graphical ads, even though they're not related to the content of the video.

The trickiest part of the new venture, he noted, won't be getting advertisers to consider buying against UGC but making sure the ads are relevant to the content. "Just because it's a stupid pet trick doesn't mean Ralston is interested," Learmonth quotes him saying.

What would happen, though, if there were video search technology available that allowed for the same sort of contextual advertising around video as Google's AdSense made possible for text-based content?

That would be good news for search engines, as well as for video producers, but very much a mixed blessing for would-be aggregators or destination sites like Myspace.

Oh wait...



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