Red Herring has reported on a comScore report stating that Fox Interactive, largely through Myspace, has surpassed Yahoo as the top dog for monthly page views:
Fox Interactive Media’s total U.S. page views increased to 39.5 million from 38.7 million during November. By contrast, Yahoo’s page views declined to 38 million from 41.6 million.
“Fox Interactive Media passed Yahoo for top property by page views for the first time,� UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote on Monday in a report.
The news is further proof that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—which last year paid $580 million for MySpace parent Intermix Media—strategy to acquire a major Internet presence has paid off.
That is impressive, but last time I checked page views don't necessarily correlate with revenue. For example, which of the following scenarios likely drives the most revenue:
a. 10,000,000 page views worth of ads for dating services.
b. 10,000,000 page views worth of search engine results with ads targeted based on the term a person searched for.
c. 10,000,000 page views worth of video downloads with ads served around the videos.
Personally, I'd put my money on "b" because it has the highest CPM. Here's the math based on a few CPM assumptions:
a.
$0.10 CPM for run of site dating ads and other random stuff = $1,000
b.
$0.50 per click with clicks generated 5% of the time for a $25 CPM = $250,000
c.
$15 CPM = $150,000 MINUS the net difference in bandwidth costs compared to 10 million non-video web pages.
Clearly, Yahoo of MySpace aren't dependent on only one form of advertising. For example, MySpace generates PPC revenue from searches. Yahoo generates CPM revenue from tons of non-search related page views. Google has the highest percentage of search related click revenues of any company at this point. That's where the big money and margins is at today. Could it move to other things, like online video advertising in pre or post-roll ads on YouTube or a new form of online advertising that hasn't been invented yet? Absolutely. But for now, any valuation based on page views without taking revenue into consideration would be a mistake.
