Recession-squeezed businesses will be able to make advertising budgets go further thanks to the likes of MySpace and Facebook.

News Corp’s MySpace has launched a self-service display ad platform that lets small businesses and individuals target pitches to site users by specifics such as gender, geography or music taste. MyAds allows advertisers to upload ads or make them with an online tool, and set a budget of €20–€7,850 for a campaign. They can target, say, fans of a particular band living in a particular city. Advertisers pay MySpace for every click on their ad, which can link to other MySpace pages, such as a band’s profile, or other websites, like a ticket-selling site.

MySpace’s marketing chief Jeff Berman says the system “opens the door to an entire, massive class of advertisers who have been effectively barred from the online display market.”

In quarter two of 2008, display ad sales rose almost 13% to €1.49bn, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. B2B advertising in social networks is also growing. According to researcher eMarketer, €41m will be spent advertising on social networks this year, which is projected to increase to €165m by 2012.