MySpace’s struggle to meet advertising targets reflects industry-wide difficulties in turning immense social networking traffic into money – but also the problems of predicting cashflows.

While MySpace has an advertising sales deal with Google that guarantees it $900m over the three years to 2010, it is not clear if a pro rata proportion of that sum is included in the current year projections that Fox Interactive will miss its fiscal year target of $1bn by June 2008.