• USA Today, Tuesday, October 9, 2007 11:15 AM

The Web press is still absolutely transfixed by Facebook (which is registering new users at a clip of 150,000 per day), so it's not surprising that executives at rival MySpace are granting interviews all over the place--'hey guys, what about us?'

To be fair, MySpace is still the largest social network, and one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web. It's also far more lucrative than its young competitor: parent Fox Interactive tells USA Today that MySpace is on pace to earn $1 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending in June. By comparison, Facebook is set to make $140 million this year. When you consider that MySpace has neither ten times the members or ten times the monthly traffic of Facebook, the News Corp. site is doing a far better job in the monetization department (of course, the Google partnership has A LOT to do with this).

In an interview with USA Today, Fox Interactive Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett talks about why. Barrett claims that MySpace offers better value for marketers because they can either create profiles to draw users as "friends" or use the "tremendous amount of information" they offer to advertise to them. A new targeting technology will lump users into buckets of 3 million-plus interests to sell to marketers. To attract more marketers, the "hypermarketing" technique, as Barrett calls it, won't initially cost more, but will rise in price in accordance with demand.

Read the whole story at USA Today »