Chernin on MySpace: Ad biz “above budget”

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin yesterday told the audience at Merrill Lynch’s investment conference that MySpace’s ad business was running ahead of plan, according to a Reuters article. That’s good news, but the overall picture still looks murky. Just last month Chernin said that Fox Interactive Media (MySpace’s parent unit) would grow its revenue 30% in fiscal 2009, down from 57% growth in fiscal 2008 (which ended June 30). While 30% in a down economy is nothing to sneeze at, the growth picture seems to be slowing faster than I had expected.

Switch to Mac? Yeah, Right.

I bought the line… I switched to Mac two months ago. I fell for the commercials (and a bit of tweaking from my husband, who bought his own Mac a few months before I did).

Yesterday my Mac died. It started off innocently – I was waiting for some content to download on the Comcast Web page, when all of a sudden a message appeared on the screen (in four languages, oddly) telling me I needed to restart. I did, and the desktop never quite came back. Then, after four tries the screen went gray and the machine started beeping at me. Never a good sign. Finally, it heaved its last breath and just went dark. Dead, gone.

The verdict from the Genius who shouted at me over the racket of customers in the overcrowded Apple Store? Kernel panic, whatever that is. Complete hard drive and logic board replacement. One-plus weeks w/o my Mac.

Luckily I still have my trusty old Dell and when I got home, I fired it up and I’m off and running. Never once in my 9 years of owning Dells has the machine failed so catastrophically as this Mac did.

Disney’s “High School Musical 3″ and MySpace

Advertiser: Disney

Product: High School Musical 3

Site: MySpace

http://www.myspace.com/hsm3

This promo, aimed squarely at high school students, gives them points for interacting with branded content related to the movie. The school with the most points gets a trip to Disney World or Disneyland for their senior class plus a concert by Natasha Bedingfield.

I’m not sure how I feel about this idea – on the one hand it’s a great way to get consumers to engage with the content, but given that it’s HSM, chances are good they would do it anyway. The promotion already has over 34,000 friends.