Myspace announced in November its plans to launch a new advertising platform, Selfserve, targeted at small businesses in early 2008. This seems like quite an important development and worthy of comment because:

1. It’s an ad platform for SMEs - now there’s quite some debate about whether Myspace is the right context for small business, and for many it undoubtedly isn’t. But the fact that Myspace has invested in Selfserve suggests that it believes it has the base already to make it a success.

2. Selfserve is about making online advertising accessible to SMEs -That means cheap (apparently pricing starts at $10) and easy - the ad platform has been designed for small businesses to set up and run their own campaigns. If Myspace achieves the latter it will have made a breakthrough as, despite Google’s efforts to date, online advertising is too damn complex for SMEs to master. Myspace acknowledged this in its release when it says that of over 23 million SMEs in the US less than 1 million advertise online.

3. Selfserve is about driving traffic to a Myspace profile - usage stays within the community and is not taken off site. This is quite a revolutionary change from traditional net marketing that is all about driving traffic to a web site. In Myspace’s model, not only is the SME spending their ad money in the network, they also have to invest time keeping their profile engaging and up to date in order to convert leads. A Selfserve advertiser will therefore be a very active Myspacer.

I’m going to be following Selfserve with interest as it’s a clear sign that Net marketing is going to be increasingly about managing a constellation of online assets in relevant communities, than sucking traffic into a stand-alone web site. It’s also an indication that engagement and quality of participation in a community will be at least as important as ad spend in driving campaign success.