News Corp Prez: Video, Mobile Ads Could Get Expensive

It looks like online video ads will soon get premium pricing. In an interview with Fortune at Brainstorm Tech on Tuesday, News Corp President Peter Chernin said advertisers still haven’t completely embraced the online opportunity, and that they continue to have a television mindset.

He said in the report that an advertiser recently told a MySpace sales rep to come back when the social network has a ‘SuperBowl-level’ event. “What the advertiser failed to recognize,” Chernin said, “is that the MySpace homepage has as many viewers every day as the SuperBowl has once a year.”

He also discussed how MySpace is having trouble securing decent ad rates for News Corp—and that the answer is probably not banner ads or text ads. “What drives ad prices is scarcity,” he said. “The place that is most promising is probably in video. By definition there’s more scarcity in video, and there’s even more scarcity in premium video.”

In addition, Chernin said in the report that mobile is attractive because of its scale. Calling it “by far the most penetrated device on earth,” he said that “it’s this enormous distribution platform, but by definition you’re not going to be watching two-hour movies. It’s going to be interesting to see people develop uniquely mobile content. It will take the medium a long time to develop.” He predicted that in two years, the industry will still be trying to figure mobile out. We’ll say.

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