MySpace, PayPal let candidates fund-raise online

By Michele Gershberg and Kenneth Li

NEW YORK (Reuters) - MySpace will let politicians and non-profit groups raise money for their campaigns through its popular social networking site in a service developed with online payments company PayPal.

The tool creates a space for soliciting donations on the MySpace pages of U.S. presidential candidates and non-profit groups, allowing a user to make the contribution from their own PayPal account, or create one quickly. It will be available on MySpace's Impact Channel highlighting social and political issues at impact.myspace.com.

The PayPal fund-raising tool allows users to add the feature to their personal MySpace pages and to encourage their friends to support the same causes.

In addition to top contenders for the 2008 White House race, non-profit groups that will use the service include RAINN, the largest U.S. organization fighting sexual assault, and FINCA International, which provides financial services to some of the world's poorest families.

"It's one thing for a campaign to go out and reach people directly and raise money, but people respond to issues and causes and pleas far more readily when it comes from people they personally know," Jeff Berman, MySpace senior vice president of public affairs, told Reuters.

A test version of the Impact Channel was launched in March and since then all of the major presidential candidates have set up dedicated pages on the site.

The Web came into its own as an outlet for communicating political messages in the past few election campaigns. Ahead of the 2008 race, social networks have become the newest tool to reach out to voters.

MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, offers candidates and charities an audience of nearly 110 million monthly users worldwide, many of them teens and young adults.