Inside the Google Search Deal — The $800M Year

2007 is the year MySpace made real money, and the year the ground moved under it.

Fox Interactive Media — the News Corporation division MySpace sat inside — was reported to be on track for revenue north of $800 million for fiscal 2008, driven overwhelmingly by MySpace and by the Google search and advertising agreement signed the previous year. By any conventional measure the acquisition had already paid for itself.

What the money bought

Advertising on MySpace in 2007 was volume business. Banner inventory across billions of monthly page views, sold on reach rather than precision, with Google's search monetization layered underneath. It worked because there was simply so much of it.

The problem with volume advertising is that the only lever you have is more volume. More ad units per page. More pages per session. More reasons to click through to a second screen for something that could have been done on the first. Each individual decision was defensible. Cumulatively, they made the site heavier every quarter.

Analysis: MySpace's advertising problem in 2007 was not greed, it was targeting. Facebook was building an ad product against verified, structured data — real names, real schools, real workplaces, real interests picked from a list. MySpace's data was gloriously unstructured: freeform text, pasted HTML, fake ages, joke names, personas. The same design choice that made MySpace culturally alive made it commercially blunt. The company had the biggest audience on the internet and could tell advertisers less about it than a competitor a quarter its size.

MySpace TV and the platform question

2007's flagship product effort was video. MySpace TV launched as a standalone destination, a bid to take the ground YouTube had captured — YouTube, which Google had bought in late 2006 for $1.65 billion, roughly three times what News Corp had paid for MySpace.

That same year, Facebook did something MySpace did not do: it opened a developer platform, letting outside companies build applications that ran inside profiles. Within months there were thousands of them. It was messy and full of junk, but it meant Facebook's product roadmap was no longer limited by Facebook's engineering headcount.

MySpace's answer came later and landed softer. The company had spent its lead building an in-house destination business, and destinations do not compound the way platforms do.

The people

DeWolfe and Anderson were still in place, still the public leadership, and by the reporting of the period increasingly at odds with News Corp over autonomy, budget, and the pace at which the site could be rebuilt. Rupert Murdoch had a division producing real revenue and a growing suspicion that the growth curve had a ceiling.

Outside the company, the competitive picture had clarified. Facebook was smaller, plainer, and growing faster in every cohort that mattered.

What it felt like

Mostly, still fine. Your profile still played your song. Your friends were still here. If you noticed anything, it was that the site was busier — more banners, more clicks, more waiting — and that a few people you knew had started saying they were mostly on Facebook now, which sounded like nothing at the time.

Why this matters in 2026

2007 is the clearest case study in consumer internet of a company winning the current quarter and losing the platform. The revenue was genuine. The traffic was genuine. And the two structural bets that decided the decade — structured data and third-party developers — were both being made somewhere else.

Any relaunch that wants MySpace's soul without MySpace's ending has to answer the 2007 question directly: how do you build a business on unstructured, self-authored, deliberately weird user data without eventually flattening it into something a media buyer can price?