As noted in our earlier report, News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) “other” segment generated $23 million in operating profit for the quarter ending Dec. 31. 2007—$22 million more than the same quarter last year—primarily due to strong growth at Fox Interactive Media, which in turn was aided by Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) guaranteed revenue for MySpace.

Some of the details from Monday’s earnings call:
-- FIM recorded $233 million total revenue for the News Corp. FYQ208, up 87 percent. The guaranteed payments from Google started in January 2007, so this should be the last quarter that will be compared to one without a payment for the life of the three-year deal. Google paid $62 million in the quarter.

-- FIM ad revenues rose 43 percent, year over year and 31 percent sequentially.

-- FIM’s operating profit was $47 million, compared with a loss of $11 million in the same quarter last year. CFO Dave DeVoe: The profit growth “reflects the revenue increases and lower management retention amortization—and it’s offset by our continued investment in the cost base and expansion of this high growth business.” Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch: “.... we are very pleased with the progress we are making at FIM, which should have much more growth ahead.”

-- COO Peter Chernin cited FIM’s targeted enthusiast advertising as one of the reasons FIM has improved. “But it is not just our targeting initiatives which have helped us regain our footing. We are very excited about our involvement with Open Social as well as our own effort to open the MySpace platform to external developers.” He continued with a comment that would have been unfathomable for a top media exec not too long ago: “it demonstrates how we embrace the widget ecosystem and supports our belief in establishing standards that foster innovation.” Yes, that was Peter Chernin talking about widget ecosystems.

-- International mix: MySpace advertising runs about 85 percent domestic, 15 percent international.

During the q&a, Chernin said he didn’t hear last week’s Google call but addressed the question about what FIM is doing to improve monetization: “First of all, clearly our revenue from Google is guaranteed, so that’s not a particular issue for us. Secondly, the assumptions on which that deal were made always suggested that Google expected the deal to reach break-even towards the latter part of the three-year period and for the deal to function as a loss leader during the early period. So I think their performance is no surprise.” But Chernin said FIM is “regularly” working with Google to improve performance— “we’re constantly looking at the placement of the search box on the page, the size of the search box, where we deliver the ads, how to get higher click-thru rates.”

A considerable amount of the q&a was devoted to MySpace, Google and related issues. The transcript is at SeekingAlpha.com. 

• Earnings: Google Q407 Call: Q4 Traffic Good; Poor Performance On Social Net Ads