TechCrunch writes that Google (GOOG) and News Corp’s (NWS) are in negotiations to expand and perhaps extend their agreement for Google to be sole provider of search services for the huge community site. The deal was worth a guarantee of $900 million to News Corp for a deal though 2010.
What is not clear is whether the deal will improves Google’s advantages in the contract. It may be that Google will begin to put display ads on MySpace. It may be that it could offer other Google services to MySpace users.
The thing that is clear is that an expansion of the deal would hardly be good news for Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (TWX), or MSN (MSFT), all of whom are trying to get back into the search game after a number of quarters of losing share to Google. Fox Interactive Media, which includes the MySpace traffic, had 135.7 million unique visitors in December, according to Comscore. This makes it the eighth most visited set of web properties in the world, a real prize. Unless Wikipedia decides to partner with a search engine (the non-profit is building its own search function) an expanded Google/MySpace deal just makes Google’s lead harder to cut.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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