Weeks after announcing massive layoffs and international restructuring, MySpace is teaming up with a subset of its parent company Fox International Channels (FIC) in order to combine and streamline advertising deals. Under the terms of the partnership FIC will manage local advertising, marketing and promotion in several countries including Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Poland, Mexico and Turkey.
These are all countries in which MySpace has a localized version of its social networking site. These are also countries that are remaining active and nurtured after the major restructuring of MySpace as a company. Under the restructure, MySpace seemingly cut back on a good portion of its international efforts, closing several offices and combining the work towards an effort to create a more centralized account of localized sites and advertising methods. This was named as an initiative for focusing on innovation, which is an area in which MySpace has been lacking in relation to competitors such as Facebook.
With FIC handling local advertising and marketing, MySpace is left to in fact direct more of its resources towards innovation and improved implementation of various services and feature offerings.
It makes you wonder why MySpace didn’t turn to various internal resources for such streamlined efforts at an earlier date. With FIC already having established offices on a global scale, turning to these internal options from an operational standpoint seems to make sense. Working more closely to align itself with some of Fox’s larger goals is one of the points brought up in our earlier article regarding what some of MySpace’s next steps could be.
Is it a win-win? From a monetary and resource allocation perspective, it could be. But when dealing with advertising for social networking, the stakes can be different from other forms of marketing. This may reign especially true on an international scale. FIC already works with online advertising, so hopefully this will in fact be a win-win situation for MySpace.
A key aspect of MySpace’s existing domination as a worldwide social network has been due to its international growth, so maintaining a presence and finding crucial ways in which to monetize these localized populations means that MySpace is readily turning to a self-reliant way to support itself financially.
Alternative marketing and monetary methods have been employed by other social networking sites such as Facebook and hi5, with an ultimate goal being a self-regulating marketplace which isn’t fully reliant on either third parties or direct ads. So the trend is not completely lost on MySpace, as the advertising industry continues to shift and its meaning within social media is an ever-changing aspect of web-based monetization.
