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Shawn Gold, the VP of Content and Marketing at MySpace, gave an update on the MySpace business at Ad:Tech in San Francisco last week .

The numbers which he used to describe his business were absolutely staggering. Get this - every day they add 250K new users to the system, get between 15-20M logins, download 30M songs, and add 11M people to other peoples’ friends lists! Oh, and they serve up 1B page-views every single day…

All that being said, and according to a recent New York Times article (requires subscription - via Don Dodge), MySpace, like many other social networking sites, is having trouble monetizing those 1B daily page-views. The culprits for this situation are manifold - it is hard to “target” ads on consumer-generated pages like the ones found on MySpace, advertisers are sometimes reluctant to have their brands associated with content which may sometimes be of questionable taste, and according to Google, when you add the inventory of consumer-generated sites like MySpace and YouTube to the overall online advertising inventory, you get a situation where supply outstrips demand.

One of the creative ways in which MySpace is trying to attract advertisers is by letting advertisers like Wendy or Best Buy create profiles on MySpace - much like users would - and then have MySpace members sign up as friends of the vendors. Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers was able to sign up 100,000 “friends” that way - that’s right 100K members!!!!

[shameless plug] If you are interested in this topic we will be having a session on the threats and opportunities of online marketing on brands at our upcoming Marketing Innovation Conference.

[Technorati Tags: myspace social networking online advertising brand risk social media]

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