Teaching New Media Old Tricks

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As a Web video, Dirty Soap seemed to have it all: hot babes, a murder mystery, racy double entendres. But the show, a reworking of Soap, the ’70s sitcom about a dysfunctional family, had a tad too much attitude for MySpace, which plans to run it later this year. During a run-through of the script at a Los Angeles restaurant in early April, an actress playing the clan’s octogenarian grandmother flashed the middle finger. That was too much for Cristian Cussen, MySpace’s 28-year-old programming chief. The flipped bird can stay, he told the producers, but it must be blurred. “I can’t show that to Procter & Gamble (PG),” Cussen later explained, BusinessWeek.com reports.


Sounds like what a network-TV guy would say, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that. Three years after acquiring MySpace for $580 million, News Corp.’s Web unit, of which MySpace is the biggest piece, has yet to hit its $1 billion revenue target. That’s why MySpace is hunting for programming that will keep its fickle young users logging on,and that will play well with advertisers. News Corp.(NWS) is applying lessons learned at its Fox network,from shooting network-style pilots to encouraging advertisers to place products on Web-TV shows,in the hopes that a viable business model will emerge. “We’d be foolish not to take advantage of what has worked for us in traditional media,” says Jeff Berman, MySpace’s sales and marketing chief.



Short Attention Span TV

Last year, Berman founded MySpace & #173;TV with the aim of using professionally produced programming to take on the likes of YouTube, which relies heavily on amateur video (and itself hasn’t yet figured out how to make money). Operating out of a cubicle farm two floors above a Mercedes dealership in Beverly Hills, MySpaceTV is a stripped-down version of Fox. Like its sibling, the outfit is bringing in viewers for focus groups, soliciting scripts from agents, and even has a troop of lawyers policing potential obscenity infractions.



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