Google Partner, MySpace Wants a Cut out of YouTube
Amit Chowdhry | Wednesday October 11, 2006 | 620 views

News Corp.’s MySpace has reexamined the pursuit to get a piece of the action out of YouTube. With Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) now owning YouTube while having a partnership with MySpace, News Corp. has a desire to expand their relationship with Google by getting some of the money that they feel is due for them.
This week, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt will be meeting with News Corp.’s Chairman, Rupert Murdoch to come to an agreement. One of the possibilities of the agreement may include the signing of a revenue sharing advertisement deal with MySpace.
Ross Levinsohn of Fox Interactive Media (child company of News Corp.) stated that “If we can figure out ways to work with them or integrate them, that could be really good for us.” As discussed in the previous post, MySpace claims that a substantial amount of traffic that YouTube receives is through embedded YouTube videos allowed on MySpace user profiles. YouTube claims that less than 20% of YouTube traffic comes from MySpace. When Google bought out YouTube, News Corp. executives were upset by the news because when offers from News Corp. to YouTube were made, the YouTube founders responded by saying that they were not for sale.
The deal that Google and MySpace currently have contracted with each other requires that Google pays MySpace $900 million in ad revenue as long as Google Ads show up on News Corp.-owned websites including MySpace. However the current pact does not include video advertising which MySpace wants to be a part of.
If a YouTube and MySpace agreement is not made, MySpace is threatening to counter YouTube by building a competitor and has held several discussions with NBC Universal and Viacom Inc. as partners. MySpace has also threatened to disallow YouTube videos from showing up on MySpace profiles. However, Viacom (also a partner of Google) is discussing with YouTube about licensing video content to them.
While the Google-YouTube deal has been applauded, there is still a lot of mess to be cleaned up. Just imagine what will happen if Facebook and Google acquisition talks go further while Microsoft has Facebook on contract until 2009.
Categorized under Google, MySpace, Viacom Inc, YouTube
If you liked this post, subscribe to the Pulse 2.0 RSS feed.