Here’s what a dog Myspace has become: News Corp. can’t get rid of the social networking site that time forgot for anything close to the amount of money it wants, so it now must beat the bushes for a “strategic partnership.”
What that means, of course, is begging someone to salvage something out of Rupert Murdoch disastrous investment.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that News Corp. is “moving toward a deal for Myspace, with a strategic partnership appearing more likely than a straight sale.”
If I told Murdoch once, I told him a thousand times: Putting a reserve price for Myspace on eBay was a big mistake! Does he ever listen to me? No! But if Roger Ailes told him…
News Corp. paid $580 million for Myspace in 2005, when the site was the top social networking property on the Internet. And while it’s still the top social networking property for unknown bands and porn stars, the rest of the world has moved over to Facebook, Twitter and Friendster (kidding).
It’s not as if Murdoch’s getting no offers for Myspace. The WSJ reports that many bids “have come in significantly lower than the $100 million News Corp. was seeking.”
This, despite a redesign last fall that News Corp. President Chase Carey said “has been very well-received by the market” and for which there are “encouraging metrics” — including a 52 percent drop in page views from November through January.
According to comScore, Myspace had 37.1 million unique U.S. visitors in April, slightly more than half of what it had a year earlier — and this after the “well-received” redesign.
Myspace lost $165 million last quarter.
My suggestion is that they donate Myspace’s remains to a graduate business school as a forensic case study, sort of the way medical schools are given cadavers for their students to explore as part of their education. Plus News Corp. could write it off.
I’m just trying to help.