Mike Arrington over at Techcrunch is reporting that myspace, or rather a representative from Fox Interactive, the firm that owns MySpace, have commented on why they recently choose to block a 3rd party widget from working on the myspace site.
To quote from the post:
"If a widget violates our TOS, we block them… …Breaches would include any person, widget or software that… …engages in commercial activity. Commercial activity includes selling ads on a MySpace page through their widget or software."
Which poses a few interesting questions for digital marketers who are thinking of going down a widget route for a campaign.
As Mike goes on to say, MySpace claim that at the moment they have no plans to charge 3rd parties using myspace to place widgets or build a business upon as a platform, but it looks like if they can stop someone from taking potential revenue from it or make MySpace a less attractive advertising proposition with potential clients, they will block then under the TOS agreement.
This is interesting from a widget marketing point of view – not for desktop widgets – but for widgets on social networks. What if myspace suddenly decide that YouTube videos are against the TOS and decide to block them from working? Or a 3rd party media player, or podcast player, etc. etc. This could spell disaster for those widget providers.
I myself have been involved in conversations where the idea of producing a widget for a campaign has seemed like a great idea, but if this were to happen, and Fox Interactive/MySpace decide to block them, those would never be possible – which would be a shame. Not necessarily a huge problem, I am sure we could find alternative ways to get around it, but it would be a shame to miss out on a possible highly targetted audience because Fox/MySpace want to control the ads and revenue to recoup their investment so much. MySpace wasn’t founded on those principles, and neither are most of the web2.0 ideas regardless of their revenue model, so it’s a shame to see this happening in this way.
Howard
–
