The move will be a trade-off of sorts. On the one hand, the News Corp. division will be able to retain a bigger share of revenues for ads, and have a more direct relationship with the advertisers: “We believe that for advertisers to build deep engagement with the user, they need to understand and work with the brand because it’s the brand online that the user is engaging with,” says Simon Daglish, the VP commercial director of MySpace (via NMA).

But on the other, by cutting off deals with several agencies, MySpace could end up missing out on the wider inventory that linking into ad networks provides: “You miss out on scale if you pull out of a third party that has lots of clients and contacts and might get you revenue or a network deal,” says Jo Lyall, head of digital at Mindshare.