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Viacom vs. News Corp. on Social Networking
dolphinlover writes "The purchase of MySpace.com by Robert Murdoch's News Corporation last year for $580 million has caught the attention of another media conglomerate, Viacom Inc., whose CEO, Tom Freston, has now announced his intentions to purchase or partner with a social networking site this year in order to enhance the company's image with youth. Whether it will also be successful monetarily has yet to be seen, as MySpace.com only had $47 million in revenue in 2005 based on advertising. This news follows Viacom's acquisition of Neopets.com in 2005. For those companies already heavily involved in television and movies, expanding their presence to the Internet provides a new opportunity to gain a foothold over the competition."
You mean "Rupert."
I've noticed that Fox and Fx have been promoting MySpace heavily by creating MySpace pages for its television shows.
As an ex-News Corp employee, I can tell you that in the case of myspace, revenue is definitely the point. News Corp sees Myspace as a perfect avenue to use for cross-promotion of its TV shows and all other media. It would like to use it to sell videos, music, anything that is owned by umbrella companies and has a price tag. I don't think that sheer and utter commercialization will work though - myspace is not a webstore. It was always my opinion that kids are fickle - push their buttons too hard or try to force something on them and they will just find another online haven. News Corp have been treading lightly because they finally clicked on to this, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the end game is total commercialization of myspace.