Will Facebook also go the way of Myspace before 2015? After all, just five years ago MySpace was riding high with over 300-million registered users and valuations as high as $12-billion. Yes, that looks like kids’ stuff compared to Facebook’s 750-million strong active userbase and their $80-billion to $100-billion valuation range, but perhaps Facebook is rising higher only to fall faster and harder.
Personally we were big fans and users of MySpace from 2003 – 2008 because of the customization that could be made to promote entertainment, connect with your social circle and discover new interests.
When NewsCorp purchased Myspace for $580 million, it was KING with rabid and addicted members – had maximum potential for customized ad revenues and partnerships with music, movies, comedy and other entertainment acts and media sources. Then somewhere in 2009… Myspace became ‘un-cool’ to users, the media partners and world-wide perception. Was it because Myspace Tom sold-out?
In 2011 the fairy-tale is over and Newscorp has announced they are selling for $30 million and only 100,000,000 registered users. It appears Facebook is KING with 640,000,000+ registered users and QZone (a Chinese social networking site) coming up close at 480,000,000+!
The question of the week: Will Facebook also go the way of Myspace before 2015? What are they doing right today versus where Tom and his MySpace kingdom went wrong in the mid-2000′s selling to NewsCorp?
See number of registered users (for different social networking sites) from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
June 29, 2011 – PCWorld.com
News Corp. Unloads MySpace
MySpace, which dominated the social-networking market in the mid-2000s before Facebook eclipsed it, has been sold by its parent company News Corp. to digital media company Specific Media, the companies announced on Wednesday.
As part of the agreement, News Corp. will buy a minority stake in Specific Media. Although the financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are reporting that the price tag was between US$30 million and $40 million.
That price range represents a small fraction of the $580 million News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005, when the site ruled the emerging social-networking market.
However, Facebook came on strong in the following years and surpassed MySpace’s popularity by 2008 with a cleaner, more elegant interface, a user culture in which most people used their real names, finer privacy controls and a robust platform and community for developers to build third-party applications.
MySpace went through several restructurings, focus changes, management shakeups and rounds of layoffs, but News Corp. couldn’t reverse its downward spiral.
As recently as October 2009, Jonathan Miller, who oversees News Corp.’s Internet businesses, pledged that MySpace would recover under the new leadership of former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta and with a focus on music and entertainment. That plan didn’t succeed and Van Natta soon left before completing a year at MySpace’s helm. MySpace’s current CEO is Mike Jones, a former AOL executive.
Read More: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/231401/news_corp_unloads_myspace.html
