MySpace Looks To Go Its Own Way With New ‘SelfServe’ Ad System

Another advertising-specific story today. This bit coming by way of MySpace.

According to a story published yesterday on TechCrunch, the largest of the Web’s social network giants is going to take some stage time at the Ad:Tech New York conference, held at the Hilton for four days this week, “to introduce a new advertising platform,” dubbed ‘SelfServe by MySpace’.

What for, you ask? The company is said to want to enhance its relationship with advertisers, and enable them to more specifically target particular segments/groups/demographics of the site, and display their spots on profile pages they deem effective as choice marketing locations.

Now, you might wonder how news of this plan is being receive by Google, considering that the Web’s advertising powerhouse is quite attached with MySpace, what with the high-profile arrangement the two have made in the area of – what else? – network advertising. But alas, Google signed on only to deliver search and text-based ads specifically, leaving a void for graphical banners and squares and things to be filled by some other money-hungry operation.

That chosen money-hungry operation is of course none other than MySpace itself, who, being the magnet that it is for impressionable youth and young adults, many of which seem to lap up ads eagerly (and don’t even know it) throughout their various daily routines, is making quite a sensible choice in going its own way in forging ties with advertisers directly.

MySpace intends to make the SelfServe experiment more widely known in the next couple of months, in order to grow the project quickly and create something of a snowball effect, eventually gaining the momentum to establish itself as a formidable force in the realm of advertising on the Web. The company of course aims to quickly expand its roster of partners massively, eventually hoping to capitalize on the growth and increasingly lucrative market of location-based targeted advertising.

Here’s how I see it. It’s quite obvious that News Corp (Myspace’s parent corporation) is looking to keep its darling Web-based acquisition on the up-and-up. And if it’s to make the most money possible from advertising, it’s best off doing so via its own system. No middlemen to consider. Just direct relations with marketers.

And I can’t say that’s a bad idea at all. Looking at how big the company has become, it seems only natural that it now works to eventually rely on its own self to pull in the bulk of its revenue. As long as it doesn’t shut out Google and make SelfServe the only way by which marketers can hawk their stuff, this move by Murdoch & Co is a good one in my book.

How do you feel about this new development? Let us know in the comments below!