• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 26, 2011

Social media, especially big social-networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, are transforming the way online users interact with everything from politics to brand marketing. But a new study from a highly regarded research and consulting firm suggests that one of the big draws isn't user-generated content so much as it is the kind of professionally produced and curated content that has historically attracted consumers to use media.

What's new, says the report from IDC, is that people are using social media outlets to access, distribute, share and influence the entertainment consumption of others. And that, say IDC analysts, is fostering a new "addressable" advertising category that is worth billions of dollars and growing fast.

How fast? The report, "Social Entertainment 2.0: What Is It, And Why Is It Important?," estimates it will grow from $2.5 billion in 2010 to $5.8 billion in 2015, averaging 18% growth per year. And that's just in the U.S. Globally, IDC estimates worldwide social entertainment ad spending to be about twice that volume.

"This potential is primarily based on advertising for premium entertainment offers," reads a copy of the report provided to Online Media Daily by its sponsor, Myspace.com. "However, entertainment sites are also well suited to tap into other advertising categories such as travel, computing, electronics, automotive, and telecommunications, which IDC estimates contribute about one-third of the overall TAM for entertainment sites."

Mike Jones, CEO of the News Corp.-owned social network, said the findings signal a huge opportunity for Myspace.com, whose roots were fundamentally about social entertainment, and whose future strategy, he says, will seek to expand that into new forms of entertainment and related advertising categories.

"It was part of the original, core Myspace DNA," he says, citing the fact that many of Myspace's earliest users were people who used it to share, sample, and experience music -- especially the kind of independent, "garage band" musicians that couldn't get distribution and marketing deals with the major record labels.

Myspace has already moved to legitimize that process by striking deals with record labels to provide full, free playbacks of music sampling, but Jones says that is just the beginning of a transformation of Myspace into a major social entertainment "Gateway" that will help its users become aware of, access, share and comment on all forms of entertainment content -- from television to movies to original Web-generated programming and even user-generated content.

In other words, Myspace wants to be the dominant portal consumers use to control their social entertainment content and experiences.

That's a formidable goal, given one of the findings of the IDC report, which indicates that Myspace currently is not one of the majors, even though it still has hundreds of millions of users.

Based on a survey of U.S. adults 18 to 34 conducted by IDC in April, the top five Internet destinations for entertainment content and news are Facebook (74%), YouTube (71%), Google (68%), Yahoo! (47%), and Hulu.com (31%). The top 5 regularly visited on mobile phones were similar: Facebook (63%), Google (45%), YouTube (39%), Yahoo! (25%), and Twitter (17%).

The report did not disclose Myspace's current ranking as an entertainment content destination, but Jones says its strategy isn't necessarily to out-muscle those destinations, but to become the central clearinghouse users come to manage, find out about and access content that might originate in other online and mobile locations.

Jones says it's been a gradual transformation for Myspace, which began to accelerate six months ago when it launched a new "topic page product" enabling its users to import the content libraries of other entertainment destinations directly into their Myspace profiles, whether it is the latest content streamed or uploaded by "Saturday Night Live," or the latest diatribe from Charlie Sheen.

"From a utility perspective, it's a faster way to get your fix for the entertainment topics you are interested in," Jones explains, adding that the focus is more on aligning Myspace with other destinations than in competing with them.

For example, Myspace recently launched a "Myspace/Facebook Mash-Up" applications that enables Myspace users to subscribe to content directly via Facebook, and import their Facebook content "likes" into their Myspace feeds.

Jones says Myspace will continue to experiment and develop its own original content as well, but that the main focus will be in simply making it easier and more satisfying for its users to access and experience the content created and distributed by others via Myspace's pages.

"I think we will do [original programming] opportunistically when there is content that fits with what we are doing," he says, "But in most cases we are going to guide you back out to the original publisher. And I think that's the right thing to do."

The payoff, he says, will be millions of page view impressions that can be monetized through advertising -- mostly to the same big brands that already are attracted to Myspace's youthful user profiles, but increasingly, directly from entertainment content brands.