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As a followup to their report on projecting Social Net revenues and our take on that optimistic forecast, eMarketer produced an analysis of Fox Interactive Media’s (FIM for short) most recent quarterly revenue numbers. For those curious, MySpace is the largest property within FIM but also includes other notable web properties like Photobucket, IGN and Scout Media.

The crux of eMarketer’s analysis is the breakdown of FIM’s quarterly revenue into average revenue per U.S. user per month. FIM announced quarterly revenues of $225 million which eMarketer estimates 80% or $180 million came from the U.S. Using Comscore unique user estimates of 88 million, that equates to $2.04 per quarter or $0.68 per month. To those playing along at home that doesn’t sound like very much and thus given all the reports of low CPM’s for social media traffic seems even more reasonable. And eMarketer draws the conclusion that MySpace is being better monetized then it used to be. That sounds like social media’s CPM’s are finally heading up.

That is until you do some basic math.

At a CPM of 10 cents (which exceeds our most recent flat rate for social media apps which folks can argue offer even better advertising options), that implies that the average user is seeing 6,800 ads a month – or 227 a day. That’s a lot.

But wait – the flaw in our analysis that MySpace is seeing better CPM’s is MySpace doesn’t equal FIM. In fact Comscore estimates that 73 million of their 88 come from MySpace. Also given the more vertical focus of some of MySpace’s sister FIM properties they’re likely seeing CPM’s much, much higher then MySpace and more like Yahoo’s – say ~$1.50. If we assume that MySpace’s other sites drive a proportional share of FIM’s traffic (17%) with an eCPM of $1.50, then suddenly those 10 billion monthly non-MySpace page views are generating $15 million a month or $45 million a quarter. So $180 million now is down to $135 million. And for comparison Photobucket before it was acquired was on pace for $10 million a quarter in revenues so $45 million from all other FIM properties seems more then reasonable.

Also, we shall not forget Google’s $300 million a year or $75 million a quarter giveaway to MySpace. Subtract Google’s $75 million and you are down to a mere $60 million a quarter or $20 million a month. Throw in some guaranteed sponsorship deals like those that Oberon Media likely paid for the right to run MySpace’s game channel and the straight advertising number gets even smaller. Let’s assume a 20% “sponsorship” rate and the monthly MySpace number is now a mere $16 million a month. At 73 million visitors a month – that translates to a mere $0.22 per U.S. user per month in CPM advertising. At that rate that’s still 2200 ads per user month. But that’s 73 per day and at 3 ads per page that’s only 24 pg views a day. Given the high page views per day we’ve seen with social media properties, that’s not at all out of the range of normal.

So the moral of the story is that social media ads are still getting $0.10 per thousand even on MySpace.