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Back in August 2006, when Google agreed to pay News Corp. $900 million to serve ads against MySpace, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin bragged, "Whoever said it remains to be seen whether we can monetize [MySpace], hopefully it's a little clearer this week." Almost two years later, "monetizing" MySpace seems more difficult than ever. At least, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought," Schmidt told a German reporter.

We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you'll buy a washing machine. It is not a long term problem but it is taking us longer than we thought.