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Social Ad Summit 2008: Full Event in Video Posted: 17 Oct 2008 01:04 PM CDT I’ve been posting the videos individually from Social Ad Summit and after uploading all of them, I’ve decided just to included the entire conference in one player. If you weren’t able to make it, check out all of the presentations below. I’ve gone ahead and placed the videos in the order of the entire event agenda. Enjoy!

MySpace Shoots for $1 Billion This Year as they Ponder Music Structure Posted: 17 Oct 2008 09:17 AM CDT MySpace may not spin off their Music product into it’s own entity as initially expected, according to Staci Kramer. Why have they decided not to take the joint-venture route as Hulu has done? It’s pretty simple: they see no point. The biggest challenge is trying to separate MySpace Music from MySpace the social network especially since it has been so tightly integrated since early on. One source at MySpace told PaidContent, “We're pretty happy with the way things have been working to get us to this launch; the idea we have to do things completely separately doesn't seem to be as relevant.” Sounds like they are pretty happy as it is! Also of interest is confirmation that MySpace is on target to reach $1 billion in revenue this year. These numbers have been passed on for some time and Matt Marshall has appeared to confirm these estimates. In comparison, Facebook has projected that they will earn around $300 million in revenue this year. You could argue that MySpace feels more pressure to monetize their site as the social network is part of a large, publicly traded company. Just two months ago we wrote that MySpace revenue should hit $650 million which was based on numbers provided by Peter Kafka. Since then it looks like projections have risen closer to $1 billion. This is an impressive number for a social network and it highlights the existing revenue potential. While the industry searches for a breakthrough monetization model, MySpace has already been able to produce substantial numbers. One has to wonder if these new revenue projections are based on an increase produced by MySpace Music. The service already has a built in advertising model and given that they had over 1 billion songs served in the first month, there is a good chance they were able to increase time spent on the site. Ultimately we’ll have to wait for their fourth quarter results to see if the $1 billion projection is reached but these numbers should be relatively encouraging for other social networks.

Social Networks Not So Recession Proof Posted: 16 Oct 2008 05:06 PM CDT Techcrunch is reporting that hi5, the worlds third largest social network, is laying off 10 to 15 percent of their staff. Mike Trigg of hi5, told Techcrunch that the company is hiring at the same time though and there won’t be a significant change in the net number of employees at the company. hi5’s growth has appeared to stagnate over the past few months based on both comScore data as well as Alexa data. Previously I suggested that the social networking space was practically immune to the recession since users would continue logging on to the internet daily. Additionally, given how early we are in social advertising, I wouldn’t expect budgets to be cut significantly (if at all) within social media. Instead budgets could even rise as Gary Vaynerchuk suggests in one of his recent personal videos. Honestly, while it’s easy to group layoffs over the past week or two into the recession group, I think any exits that take place in the social networking space during this time should be thoroughly examined. Just because there are departures and potential restructurings, does not mean that the social web economy is going to be substantially impacted. Conversely, after reading all of the reports by venture capitalists over the past few weeks, it wouldn’t be surprising to see many of the venture backed startups cut back on their spending. The only reason is not based on revenue projections but based on a more challenging environment to raise later rounds of funding. From what Mike Trigg said, it sounds like basic restructuring. I’m interested to see if this trend continues.

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