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Somehow, Fox Interactive revenues dropped last quarter despite traffic to MySpace, the News Corp. Web unit's main property, growing. News Corp. chairman Peter Chernin offered three excuses:

  • MySpace users click around so much and create so many pageviews that ad inventory supply outweighs advertiser demand.
  • It's hard to tell why a particular user is using MySpace, so targeting ads are difficult.
  • FIM is having a hard time coming up with convincing metrics to sell advertisers on the value of a friend's recommendation.

What Chernin didn't explain: Which of these excuses didn't hold true for the previous quarter, when revenues were higher.