MySpace and Yahoo! battle on the fantasy front

In this post, I discussed how Yahoo! was primed to continue being a great home to its millions of customers by being a "sticky" and "relationshippy" partner, as opposed to a destination for information. In fact to this day I still find competitor Google to be more of a destination for information of all kinds, and Yahoo! to be more like a community. Although Google has made great strides to change things with personalized this and personalized that.

So is there a new game in town? You bet there is, and it's News Corp.'s MySpace.com. With Fox Sports being part of the same happy family, MySpace.com is being positioned as a home to millions of fantasy football players all over the U.S. in a challenge to Yahoo! Sports' leadership in this rather unique, nichy, and lucrative "sticky" business. With live scoring and statistics available to users of MySpace's fantasy football offering -- which cost extra at Yahoo! -- here's another example that may force Yahoo! to up the ante in its offering, like Google's Gmail did years ago when Yahoo!'s email offering featured a measly 2MB of storage.

News Corp. execs aren't being lackadaisical or lazy, they are already mingling assets under the Murdoch umbrella in an attempt to grow the fortunes of News Corp. and entrench cross-promotional properties across mediums like television and the Internet. The purchase of MySpace.com gave Murdoch's company a built-in user base of highly-desirable consumers. If it can keep them by not being a totalitarian corporate overlord, which it has not done yet so far, the future will be brighter than it has been in some time -- except for the competition.