Myspace China also does news, Sina is afraid?
Sina reports: MySpace will launch news service to attract advertisers
Beijing time April 19 news, according to foreign media reports, News Corp's social networking site MySpace will start testing a new service from this Thursday - MySpace News, hoping to promote advertising revenue growth.
MySpace News is a news aggregation service, similar to Google News. At the same time, it allows readers to rate news, similar to Digg.com. So MySpace News can be seen as a cross between Google News and Digg.com. MySpace had more than 100 million unique visitors in March, according to the latest data released by comScore Network. MySpace is no doubt hoping to retain those users by offering more attractive services.
News Corp executives say they have been looking for more entertainment and other types of content from other media sources to further cement their leading position in the Internet market. News Corp. expects its digital business unit to generate more than $500 million in revenue in the current fiscal year. Previously, MySpace users had to take a break from the nation's largest social networking site to read online news. According to comScore, users in the United States spent an average of 10 minutes per visit to MySpace in March, and the average user visited the site 19 times per month.
MySpace News will include 25 topics and about 300 subcategories, covering areas as diverse as charity, gossip, cars and fashion. The technology used in MySpace News was built by Newroo, a company acquired by News Corp last year. Brian, co-founder of Newroo. "With the launch of this service, there will be a lot of brands looking to partner with MySpace," says Brian Norgard, chief executive of myspace. For example, the auto channel of MySpace News could attract a lot of big auto manufacturers looking to grow their audience among MySpace members.
News Corp. executives say the MySpace news service has more news sources than Google. According to Google, its news service has about 4,500 news sources.