A sign of how insular the world of big media is: Confirmation of Miller's job offer comes from Ross Levinsohn, who held much the same job before leaving News Corp. to start a venture-capital fund with Miller.

It's all a crazy waiting game until the aging mogul can install his wayward children in power. Most believe that's the reason why Chernin left, as it grew increasingly clear that Murdoch would never let the Hollywood hired hand become CEO of News Corp. But there are plenty of takers for the big jobs available in the meantime.

Miller replaces Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, who, as many inside News Corp. expected, is taking a job with the L.A.-based Fox TV and movie units. Miller, though, will have more power than Levinsohn, running pretty much everything with a URL attached and reporting directly to Murdoch. He'll need that authority to rein in wayward MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, who has long resisted reporting to the suits rotating through the executive suite of Fox Interactive Media.

If he takes the job, that is. Papers aren't signed yet, for reasons that are mostly legalese. Miller was ousted as AOL's CEO in 2006, replaced by the astoundingly awful Randy Falco. He's since been looking for a comeback, most recently through the VC firm Velocity Interactive Group — but he's been stymied by a noncompete agreement with AOL parent Time Warner, whose CEO, Jeff Bewkes, nastily decided to enforce after Yahoo invited Miller to join its board.

That noncompete ends in three days. Assuming Miller accepts the offer, and it seems like it would be enormously embarrassing for him not to, he'd be ending one long-running drama and joining another.

(Photo via LAT)

There are, nevertheless, some possibilities.

One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company.

A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring.

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there.

And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be.

More:

• 5 reasons why Jerry Yang is done at Yahoo
• Jerry Yang's goodbye letter to Yahoo
• Yahoos quietly cheer Yang's exit
• Newsweek reporter: Yahoo PR "lying sacks of s—-"

• Ads are banners, not text — either 728×90 or 300×250.
• The ads must link to another MySpace page, rather than offsite.
• Minimum campaign buy: $25
• The ad system seems tied to the pending launch of MySpace Music, a venture with the Big Four record labels.

• Though MySpace has worked hard to improve its overall site design, its been plagued by spam-happy advertisers and banner-ad schemesters from its very beginning. Because of that and the site's junky-looking past (and we think present), MySpace remains a "tarnished" brand. Brand managers don't want to soil their own through association.
• Ad buyers tend to buy ads from people they know. MySpace's ad sales force has had a lot of turnover and its been hard to form relationships with them, says our guy.
• Though our guy doesn't use it, the people in his agency who do tell him MySpace's vaunted ad-targeting technology called "Hypertargeting" doesn't work. Sure, its good enough at telling an ad buyer who are the users who would visit the page on which the ad would appear, but it doesn't help to make sure the ad fits within the page's context. "Are [users] seeing the ad? Or are they trained to ignore it?" Also, our guy has some branding advice for MySpace. Get rid of the "hyper" in "hypertargeting." Like as if it were called Xtreme Targeting, the "hyper" makes it sound like News Corp is trying to dress up the technology as more than it is. Which, of course, it probably is.

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.

• Chernin: MySpace users click around so much and create so many pageviews that ad inventory supply outweighs advertiser demand. Ad buyer:

  Not unique to them. Networks have tons of inventory, search has tons of inventory. Untargeted or contextualized inventory is hard to sell. Targeted, contextualized inventory is in demand and should continue to be. My Space has enough professional content to be attractive for big brands. Their "hyper-targeting" is effective.

• Chernin: It's hard to tell why a particular user is using MySpace, so targeting ads are difficult. Ad buyer:

  True. And social networks may not provide the diversity and revenue potential as other segments like search or networks which have specific high value content and audiences like upscale travel or mortgage buyers. Social networks still offer the hard to reach young audience and entertainment and telecommunications advertisers are among the biggest online. There is room for social networks to learn how to be more effective with their target audiences as regards advertising reception and impact. It is a very new channel, fair to need more time to learn. I do firmly believe in the long term viability and value of social networks for marketing.

• Chernin: FIM is having a hard time coming up with convincing metrics to sell advertisers on the value of a friend's recommendation. Ad buyer:

  Well we do believe that word of mouth and peer pass along and influencing is genuinely valuable, but again hard to quantify. MySpace did do a good study with a third party called 'Never Ending Friending'that was a step in the right direction.

Finally, we asked what News Corp. ought to be doing to boost its sales. Our source responded:

We do use MySpace. Our clients are interested. We like their hyper-targeting and expanded content channels like TV and music. I think for MySpace it's about the novelty of their channel and the need to figure out how to position the product and deliver value to clients in a tangible way.

• MySpace users click around so much and create so many pageviews that ad inventory supply outweighs advertiser demand.
• It's hard to tell why a particular user is using MySpace, so targeting ads are difficult.
• FIM is having a hard time coming up with convincing metrics to sell advertisers on the value of a friend's recommendation.

Rumor has it that News Corp. COO Peter Chernin was against bringing Anderson and DeWolfe back. Good to know someone within Rupert Murdoch's empire is capable of reading a traffic chart.

(Photo by AP)

"If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it's Flicker [sic], whether it's Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace," Chernin said at the conference. "There's no reason why we can't build a parallel business."

Oh, a smackdown and a threat! Here's what to expect:

• A blogger uproar. Check.
• A few articles in tech news (check), followed by some mainstream mentions.
• Editorials connecting this statement to News Corp's recent purchase of 51% of ringtone company Jamba. These editorials will say things like "2+2=MySpace will try to put more content on more phones." Well duh — that's why they made a deal with the Helio phone network.

News Corp. May Launch YouTube Rival [MultiChannel]