News Corp Plans Commerce Tools for MySpace

Ross Levinsohn is in charge of marketing the advertising space at all the News Corp. web sites. In an interview in the Wall Street Journal, he describes a very interesting idea to enable mulit-level marketing at Myspace. It's just an idea that's 'out there,' but one that could greatly increase the power and loyalty of their users. IF it works!

WSJ.com - Questions for … Ross Levinsohn by Julia Angwin (subscription required)

The home pages people are creating today on MySpace.com are really the center of their universes. They are very engaged with it and we should be able to give them the tools to do anything from those pages.

Maybe it's a cross between eBay and Amway. If somebody downloads a clip of "The Simpsons" and posts it and I go to that site and see that my friend has downloaded it, I should be able to buy it right from that page without going to the video store. In addition, if you want to sell me a bicycle, we should be able to transact that as well.

To do this, we need communications tools. We need a commerce engine. We need a credit-card processing engine. We need the ability to sell and serve targeted advertising. And we need a next-generation system that makes it easier for people to post items and slide things around. Those are all things we're working on.