MySpace just wasn't the place for users - or News Corp

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 02 July 2011 12:18

Your IT - Home IT

Murdoch's MySpace is no longer, with ad-firm 'Specific Media' buying the troubled social networking site for hundreds of millions of dollars less than the Sun King paid for it.

When it comes to dominating the media, maven Murdoch's massive empire is a major player.

The MySpace purchase at US $580 was meant to solidify Rupert Murdoch's digital destiny, and while MySpace did a US $900m advertising deal with Google and once had 70m unique users per month, MySpace's once massive power is now most definitely moot.

That is especially so with less than 35m MySpace users now logging on per month, compared to over 157m monthly users for Facebook, as Facebook edges ever closer to a record-breaking billion user mark.

Over the past few years, MySpace has tried to re-invent itself as 'the' place for music and entertainment, but users were largely unimpressed - or the sale, at a reported US $35m, wouldn't have been necessary.

Unfortunately for 'Specific Media', the new owner of MySpace hasn't been very specific as yet on what it will do to to try and turn the fortunes of MySpace around, although with one of Specific Media's co-investors in MySpace being Justin Timberlake, there is a new hope.

Yes, Mr Timberlake might well have the secret to bringing the 'sexy' back to MySpace, but if Mr Murdoch and his masses couldn't do it, can Mr Timberlake bring the right timbre to MySpace's upcoming new tune?

MySpace's sale also comes at the same time that Google has launched its latest Facebook competitor, Google+, putting even more pressure on MySpace to reignite its relevance to a jaded digerati.

Still, perhaps social networking just isn't as compelling or amazing as everyone first thought, with Facebook having to face claims of falling user numbers in the US, even as global Facebook users grow.

Facebook has faced privacy backlashes after all thanks to its actions in changing privacy settings repeatedly over the past few years, but at least Facebook's actions have kept it firmly in the press, whereas little that MySpace did seemed to register with anyone.

So, with MySpace finally sold for less than 10% of its original purchase price at long last, Rupert Murdoch's global media empire can get back to the business of news, publishing and Internet paywalls, while still holding a 10% shareholding in MySpace, presumably as a just-in-case.

MySpace's new owners had better hit the ground running, though, or to paraphrase and re-abuse a well-worn meme, Facebook and Google+ may soon be saying that 'all your MySpace (users) are belong to us', an outcome that would be very, very far from bringing the sexy back to the MySpace place.