• by Shankar Gupta , June 9, 2006

Although MySpace has brought significant traffic to the Fox Interactive family of sites, the biggest asset the network has received from the $580-million-dollar purchase is the information that the sites' millions upon millions of users provide, said Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive, at a conference in New York City Thursday.

"The digital gold inside of MySpace wasn't the number of users, but the information they're providing, structured and unstructured data," Levinsohn said--both demographic and psychographic data that Fox Interactive can use to suss out the brand preferences of young people on the Web.

Levinsohn said that the site isn't intended to be like a portal, and that "it's more about [users] presenting themselves to the world" by creatively expressing themselves through their MySpace profiles. "It's important for us not to suppress that--not to push content," he said.

More mainstream marketing on MySpace will be kept to the "well-lit" areas of the site, like the Books, Comedy, Film, and Games sections rather than on individual profile pages, which have less strict content controls--something many advertisers have expressed concerns about. ""We want to make it easier for marketers to work with us," Levinsohn said. "We have a lot of work to do."

Tobi Elkin contribued to this report.