MySpace Taps Small Businesses in Ad-Money Quest

Just because your band doesn’t have the bucks for a six-figure advertising campaign doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be interested in promoting it on MySpace.

At least, that’s what the Internet social network is banking on with a new self-service graphical “display” advertising platform that lets small businesses and individuals target their pitches to site users by characteristics like gender, geography and musical preferences.

Called MyAds, it was rolled out in “beta” test phase in late September after a three-month closed test. MySpace disclosed the service Monday in the News Corp.-owned company’s latest attempt to cash in on its vast audience. Advertising has yet to fully blossom on networks like MySpace and Facebook, partly because advertisers have questioned how attentive people are to pitches in such casual, social settings.

The idea of self-service advertising is not new — Google Inc. has been doing so for years with text-based ads through its AdSense platform. But it has generally been more difficult to combine self-service with display ads. While Yahoo Inc. is trying to merge do-it-yourself tactics with display ads through a new advertising platform, its tools for advertisers won’t be available until next year.

With the new MySpace service, advertisers can upload their own ads or make them quickly with an online tool, and set a budget of $25 to $10,000 for their campaigns.

Advertisers can choose to target, say, fans of the band Coldplay who live in San Francisco. The advertisers then pay MySpace each time someone clicks on their ad. Ads can link to other MySpace pages, such as a band’s profile, or external Web sites, like a ticket-buying site.

MyAds makes use of the targeting capabilities MySpace rolled out in October 2007, letting marketers hone their ads to specific groups of people by using public data on users’ profiles, blogs and comments.

Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president…