News from European Yellow Pages Publishers

There is this site that I normally get my dose of information regarding what's happening in the Yellow Pages and Directory Publishing arena.
Their focus is a little wider as their members are not just Yellow Pages publishers but all kinds plus the New Media, hence its quite interesting to catch up some of the news coming from here. Anyway, I also represent the 3L systems in this part of the world. So, I need to catch up with the news from there. 3L systems is used widely by mid sized publishing companies such as Eniro.

Here is a lead from them about social network advertising - Are MySpace users getting immune to ads?

Fri, 08/02/2008 - 10:29. Sector news

Business Week writes that while News Corp., owner of MySpace is thrilled about its social network's ad-revenue growth, Google and advertisers say marketing messages aren't getting through. One company, advertising on MySpace said that ads on MySpace had lost a lot of their force, measured by the number of times users clicked on them. The ads' click-through rate plummeted from one in 100—a decent return by Web standards—in 2006 to one in 1,000 in 2007. "Users became more or less desensitized to the advertising," said the advertiser. But News Corp. still wins.

Sales for Fox Interactive Media (FIM), the division that includes MySpace, surged 87% in the last three months of 2007 from a year earlier, primarly due to revenue growth for search and advertising at MySpace. Of the total revenue generated by FIM, $62 million, or 26%, comes from a deal with Google that gives Google the exclusive right to place search ads on MySpace pages. Google acts as a middleman between marketers who want to reach social-network users and the networks where those ads are placed. But Google pays News Corp. for that right even when the ads don't generate much, if any, revenue. Google is not amused. (Source: BusinessWeek.com)

What do you think about the social networking with advertising... it looks like consumers are being followed everywhere.. even to their toilets!!!