Yahoo's non-conundrum on losing the MySpace.com business

MySpace.com seems to be the hottest ticket around these days for Internet eyeballs. Specifically, the highly-touted younger eyeballs that many advertisers love to court. There are reports that Google missed the boat on purchasing MySpace.com earlier (according to this story), and shortly thereafter Rupert Murdoch beat Viacom to land the immensely-popular social networking site for $580 million. That gives News. Corp an instant presence in the online world, although it's been very careful about not transplanting its own brand and identity to MySpace.com. Even the founders are still around and are running the site and operations just like before. Smart move, Rupert.

With the just-announced partnership with Google, MySpace.com will now be replacing its generic search engine with Google search, which will most likely be a huge winner for both. Google gets its advertiser's ads in front of billions of page views, and MySpace.com gets a highly-relevant search function that will connect its customers with information just like its customers do now -- they connect themselves to one another.

Does Yahoo! fit into all this? It could have. The world's largest Internet portal lost out on its bid to supply search services to MySpace.com to rival Google. Although that was a blow to Yahoo!, it was by no means a death sentence to the company. Yahoo! continues to be the leader for Internet-focused eyeballs, garnering more visits than any other web property around. It just won't lose customers like dust in the wind, regardless of the Google/MySpace.com relationship. Sure, MySpace.com surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most heavily-visited web destination last month (according to Hitwise). That's a problem that Yahoo! should be attacking, but it's far from a death sentence. Yahoo's varying services for customers encompass so many different types of content it'll be just fine -- if it keeps innovating to stay where it is.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.