The success of MySpace

There's an excellent Spencer Reiss article in the July 06 Wired about News Corp's aquisition of this platform. It's amazing that some 280k people are still signing up every day.

Particularly of note is that the advertising angle still hasn't been figured out; if each of the millions of user-created pages has a different interest set, and if much of the content of those pages is an alphabet soup of text-message semaphore and emoticons, how do you determine what products are likely to excite your target audience?

As Reiss points out, "Thats why a top-priced Google ad say, one that appears with search results for the word refinance is valued in dollars per click, while a MySpace ad clocks in around a hundredth of a cent per view."