"Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.” News Corp, meanwhile, contends that the request to adopt Ajax came at the beginning of 2009 – when Facebook had already established its supremacy. In other words, it was too little, too late."
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How much of the ad revenue decline has been attributed to Ajax? I think in the case of MySpace, it had the dual effect of holding back UI and decreasing ad revenue.
