Making MySpace work commercially

Jay Stevens from MySpace was one of the guests at ITV Marketing's "Digital think in" yesterday. According to Media Guardian, who helpfully blog these sorts of things live, he claimed that Channel 4's partnership with MySpace for Skins nearly tripled audience share.

The key to making these sorts of things work is to give people "extra" and exciting things for free. At the last count Skins had 40,000 friends and over 300,000 views - many of which would have been attracted by the uncut party trailer.

And last year, almost 2.5m people signed up to be friends with the latest X-Men movie, which entitled them to premium content - both from the film, and also on MySpace itself.