MSN searches for leverage
Published: 06 Apr 2004 12:20 BST
Can you characterise the importance of the licensing deal with Major League Baseball and how that plays into your long-term strategy with the newly launched MSN Video?
It's a great way to aggregate a lot of additional consumer interests and time on the MSN network, which will increase our traffic, reaching and engaging more people.
We also sell online advertising and will have the rights in this deal to sell all online advertising throughout all the MLB video broadcasts. Broadband video advertising is one of the things that will kick off the next wave of brand advertising. So we now have a very unique property to go talk to Fortune 500 accounts about doing brand advertising in a way you cannot do anywhere else.
MSN cancelled its community sites in Europe last year, citing its inability to police them adequately. Do you have any plans to invest in social networking?
We actually shut down the chat service, to be precise, not the community. There is an important distinction there. We did shut down the chat service, and the reason we shut down is that there was just an amazing amount of really bad things going on there, like paedophiles chasing after kids.
In terms of social networking, we think it is a very interesting area. Truth to be told, MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it's very, very close. The only thing that is not there is just an extension for which I could see my friends' friends.
How much responsibility does an Internet service provider have to protect customers from unwanted viruses, spam, pornography and fraud? How well do you think MSN is helping customers deal with these problems now?
I think it is super important to protect people from those things. As an ISP, I think if you do not have a service like that, you will not be around for long. People really do need that help to protect against spam and spyware and all that. I think we do as good a job as anybody in the industry. Maybe even the best job, but I do not think it is enough.
What are customers asking for right now, and how well are you fulfilling their needs?
Safety, security, privacy -- and we just need to do a better job of addressing that. Even in spite of all our good work on spam protection, we may have to look at going even harder, in terms of providing a more restrictive way for people to get email and make that an option for people to choose if they want to reduce that spam.
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