A look at News Corp earnings shows that the "other" revenue and profit line, which is mostly its online service MySpace, only had an operating profit of $23 million. MySpace is one of the largest websites in the world. That can't be good for the value of social networks. So far, there is not a lot of evidence that the universe's largest video-sharing site, YouTube, is bringing in much money for Google.
According to The Wall Street Journal, an "issue is advertiser comfort with having their ads displayed alongside less-predictable content."
Predictability is not the entire problem. Social networks and video-sharing sites are a maze of unrelated content of questionable quality. Sites like MySpace have a large portion of their members who are weirdos and agoraphobics. Advertisers who spend any times on these sites know that.
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