Last week, there was some chatter in the blogosphere about MySpace allowing advertising on the Application Gallery. It’s important to us that you all have accurate information about our advertising program and our commitment to supporting ALL developers and ensuring a level playing field for everyone.
MySpace is an ad supported site, and we‘re focused on balancing revenue and relevancy across all of our business units – including the MySpace developer platform. It’s common practice for developers who want to promote their applications to purchase advertising through networks on our platform or other platforms. The Featured Apps in the Application Gallery are a combination of editorial and paid placement. They are based on sponsorship and “Editor’s Picks”: apps that the MDP team thinks are really awesome. We’ve reserved a portion of the paid placements to rotate “Editor’s Picks” applications into the Featured Apps and our editorial picks will be clearly labeled as “Editor’s Picks” so as to differentiate between sponsored Featured Apps.
Our advertising programs are available for app developers to further promote their applications in the MySpace Application Gallery and the Application Gallery main page was designed to accommodate a wide variety of advertisers —everyone from the brand-driven advertisers who want to pay a premium for a fixed position (they buy the CPM programs) to the small / mid tier guys who are very performance focused (they buy the CPC programs) to the space we have reserved for the “Editors picks. Having advertising doesn't mean we're limiting developers from building rich and engaging apps.
In addition to “Editor’s Picks”, four, 350x100 ad units are available to app developers on the Application Gallery main page and one, 540x200 ad unit is available on each Application Gallery category page. These units are available via fixed position buys or thru performance-driven campaigns on a CPC basis.
For anyone that participates in an ad campaign, MySpace is enabling app developers to reach specific user segments across MySpace based on activity and interest information provided by users on their MySpace profile pages via an ad program known as Hypertargeting. The Hypertargeted ad feature has been performing well, delivering up to 5x ad click thru performance for app developers who ran the same campaigns on a non-targeted basis. If you're interested in more information about the promotional programs you can contact James Hatcher at MySpace (jhatcher@myspace.com).
Advertising on the Application Gallery in no way means that MySpace will limit the functionality for developers to build rich and engaging applications. All developers have access to the same APIs via OpenSocial standards. The charts (newest, alpha, most popular, etc.) are democratic in the way they are determined and displayed and everyone from Mumbai to Moscow to Michigan is invited and encouraged to develop on MySpace -- whether you’re 18 or 114.
Finally, we’re committed to supporting developers with approved MySpace applications in their media outreach efforts to provide the best possible visibility. Here's a prior blog post on how to get involved. We have a clean feedback process – everyone has a voice and an opportunity to communicate with the developer team at MySpace, so please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
/Kyle