MySpace Yellow Pages: 40% of U.S. Moms Can’t Be Wrong?

Just sat through the Jeff Berman of MySpace’s keynote at the Kelsey Group’s Marketplaces 2009 conference.  There was a lot of talk about personalization and how huge the audience is, but I only heard lip service paid to local.  Berman gave an example of how a roofer got a $30K deal via a $100 self-serve ad, but I didn’t get the sense that MySpace was truly focusing on local.

The most intriguing stat he mentioned was that 40% of U.S. moms are now on MySpace, which prompted these excellent Tweets.  My first thought was that if MySpace truly has 40% of U.S. moms engaging with their service, why are they not doing more to provide them with info on local services?

As many of you know mom’s make a huge percentage of local purchases and they are the target most yellow pages companies go after.  So there’s clearly potential for a local search service that MySpace users might want.

And consider that local search queries generate significantly higher revenue per search than many other forms of advertising and I wonder why MySpace has not made a play to add a directory service to the site.

Perhaps they are getting too much revenue from advertisers like Superpages?  Check out this homepage takeover I just found: