Chernin On MySpace Effect On News Corp; Hulu International JVs
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp, is speaking at Fortune's conference, and talked about MySpace's effect on News Corp (NYSE: NWS). One example he gave: "If we did anything on Hulu it was about user experience...every decision we made was the lens of user experience. And that very much came from managing MySpace...What users were more interested in was aggregation...so we weren't that interested in developing that model on Fox.com."
Category scarcity: "We have to create category scarcity...that category these days is video. If you see us as a company, we will put a lot more resources in video...MySpace TV is one of them. Next category is MySpace Music, which again has similar economics."
Brand advertisers on MySpace: The challenges are that advertisers are conservative...they took a while to start advertising online, and even then, on the portals. The biggest challenge we have to tell them is that all those people you thought were on those portals are now on social networks. The fact of the matter is, the homepage of MySpace is bigger everyday than American Idol...so we have scale.
He also talked very briefly about Hulu's international expansion: he said they would probably try and do it as series of JVs in specific countries
By Rafat Ali