Can Google Fix Its MySpace Problem With Demographic Targeting?

Google is starting to incorporate demographic targeting into AdWords. You’ve got to wonder if this is how Google hopes to fix its MySpace problem. Google watchers will recall that when the company missed its fourth quarter earnings, it partly blamed the poor performance of its ads on social networks (read: MySpace). By offering demographic targeting on MySpace and other social sites, perhaps Google is hoping to turn that around. It certainly needs to do something to make all of that social-network ad inventory pay off. As of last Friday, advertisers could target their ads by age or gender on 31 participating sites in Google’s ad network that provide such information. The most noteworthy ones are MySpace, Friendster, and YouTube. The rest, with a few exceptions, aren’t exactly the type of sites that big advertisers clamor for, so this isn’t going to have a big immediate impact. AdWords already lets advertisers target demographically by site, taking generalized demographic data for entire sites from comScore. But this is different because it allows targeting by individual user.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/24/can-google-fix-its-myspace-problem-with-demographic-targeting/