News Corp Seeks To Sweeten Its Ad Deal With Google
News Corp’s chief digital officer and MySpace chief executive officer announced plans to sell increased access to its media properties to Google Inc in a renewed advertising agreement between the two firms.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference on Wednesday, News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller and recently appointed MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta said the media conglomerate was hoping to increase their existing advertising deal.
"When it comes time to negotiate, one of the things that can be helpful is looking at it from the overall News Corp perspective," Miller said.
Google is currently permitted to run ads on News Corps’ social network MySpace. The agreement is set to expire in a year and a half, said Van Natta.
It was recently reported that Google is hoping to renegotiate the deal in order to discount certain items. IT blog Tech Crunch says those discounts would amount to about $300 million a year.
"That’s an important deal for us, but it certainly isn’t a majority of our revenue," Van Natta said.
At the conference on Thursday, Van Natta said he saw great opportunity in MySpace, which has recently fallen behind as it now only holds 130 users compared to Facebook’s 200 million.
"When I look at MySpace there’s just so much opportunity to build," said 39-year-old Van Natta, a former Facebook executive. "I took the job because there’s a lot more that can be done around innovation."
"Certainly we’re not the darling of the press right now, I think that’s pretty clear," he said.
Van Natta pointed out the creative potential of MySpace compared to Facebook, as the Beverly Hills, California-based firm allows its users to tweak the layout of their personal profile pages.
"I’m a big believer in personalization," he said. "Our job is to make MySpace really, really great for everybody, and that means that the experience has to be different for everybody."
He said he would like to leave what people enjoy and add new options for different users.
“Personalization is ultimately the path you take to make this work for as many people who are using it today,” he said.
News Corp, which owns MySpace, hired Van Natta last month after co-founder Chris DeWolfe announced his departure from the social networking site.
Before he began his work with Facebook, Van Natta served as vice president of worldwide business and corporate development for Amazon.com. After leaving Facebook in 2008, Van Natta became CEO of online music company Playlist.com.
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