Specific Media To Buy MySpace

tripleevenfall writes "Ad-targeting firm Specific Media has agreed to buy News Corp.'s struggling social-media site Myspace. The deal for $35 million is well below the $100 million News Corp. was seeking for the troubled social-media site. The deal involves considerably more equity for News Corp. than cash and they will retain a small stake in the site, according to a person familiar with the matter."

Comments

one down one to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we only need to do something to convince people that facebook is for old people and maybe this whole "connect with people on the internet fad" will be over with and done. Good riddance I say. Now please excuse me I am going to go over and read today's xkcd as a way to use the internet the way God planned it.

Re:one down one to go

[Anonymous Coward]

How droll. Connecting with people has always been a part of the Internet. It's gleefully destroying your own privacy to the extent that it's a moral statement that's new.

Re:one down one to go

[second_coming]

Silly me. I thought connections were what the internet was all about.

Congrats

[greymond]

On buying a site no one but "indie" musicians care about.

Re:Congrats

[oldmac31310]

Hey I'm a musician/producer and have two MySpace pages and I don't care about it! It has been of almost no use to me.

Ha ha rupert

[interkin3tic]

News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, sold it for $35 million. 6% eh? Always nice when nice things happen to nice people.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, well, at least he still has a friend in 'tom'.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[eln]

There was an article in Bloomberg Businessweek last week about MySpace and how it all went wrong. It's really interesting how quickly MySpace went from the planned jewel in the crown of News Corp. to Murdoch's abandoned stepchild.

Even at the time of the News Corp acquisition, cracks were showing in MySpace's dominance of the social network scene, but the infusion of cash and media expertise from News Corp could potentially have helped it. Unfortunately, once Murdoch shifted his focus to acquiring the Wall Street Journal, he no longer cared about what happened to MySpace and any hope (however small) of saving it was lost.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[stern]

You ignore the fact that they earned income on it in the meantime. Revenue in 2008 was $900 million (I don't know what the profit was). I believe that News Corp's investment in MySpace may have been quite profitable, even if they had only a stub left at the end.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[Lunix Nutcase]

If it made no profit it doesn't matter if the site made $500 trillion in revenue.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[interkin3tic]

You ignore the fact that they earned income on it in the meantime. Revenue in 2008 was $900 million (I don't know what the profit was). I believe that News Corp's investment in MySpace may have been quite profitable, even if they had only a stub left at the end.

I think if it were profitable, they'd be selling it for more than 6% of what they paid for it.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[jd]

They'll sell it for what people think it's worth today, not what income was derived through it, say, last year or the year before. If it has no value now, then 6% of what they paid for it might actually be a very good deal no matter how much they made from it before.

There may be other reasons for the sale. News International is currently in VERY Hot Water in the UK (espionage against government officials, hacking into phones of celebrities, bugging, and may have been carrying out bribery or intimidation against senior officials in Scotland Yard) - cash from a fire sale will help keep the books in the black and avoid the shareholders getting cold feet.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[228e2]

Heh, Tom left myspace a long time ago . . .you no longer get his as an auto friend.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[the_humeister]

I never understood how or why MySpace became so popular. The individual pages were just so bad: horrible backgrounds, horrible background music that won't shut up, videos that keep playing, etc. It all reminded me of geocities (*shudder*). In contrast, Facebook just provides a much more clean and polished look.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[rtb61]

In the weird and corrupt world of high finance they did not sell it for 35 million dollars, they sold in for 35 million dollars worth of stock of the company buying it. Now it depends what the companies worth, ie news group is selling my space but via owning a large chunk of specific media still owns myspace.

So a quick shuffle shake to try rebranding with some troll B$ celebrities or on-sell specific media with the now delusion marketing that they bought myspace cheap and a worth a whole lot more (especially after dumping most of myspace staff, leaving it run in high profit inevitable maintenance and update collapse mode).

Then of course unlike you little people, there is the whole write off $545 million as a tax avoidance scam against other income whilst in reality still owning myspace by owning the bought it.

Re:Ha ha rupert

[XahXhaX]

That's probably why it became popular. The development of social networking mirrors the rise and development of the internet. Myspace is to social networking what Geocities was to the early web.

Plus, it was 'the thing' to do if you were in a band, so just about everybody from major to indie was on there and that attracted a ton of their users.

A match made in heaven?

[torgis]

So, let me get this straight. A social media site known mainly for the sheer hideousness of its user-created pages has been purchased by an ad-targeting agency known for its slow, blinky, flash-ridden, "shoot the monkey" ads? Dear god. Not since geocities has a user been easily able to chew up pre-generated HTML and barf up horrible atrocities of clashing styles and colors that make it feel as if your eyes are being raped with a wire brush. If you have photosensitive epilepsy you might want to avoid myspace in the future. In fact, even if you don't have photosensitive epilepsy, you might want to steer clear as well.

So...

[denzacar]

You're saying MySpace WAS useful for something after all?

Bet

[Niris]

Bet Tom is laughing in his pile of money.

Re:Bet

[blair1q]

Maybe not.

He tried to buy it back when the price was still $100 million.

Re:Bet

[mr_lizard13]

Hey, Tom's my friend on MySpace, leave him out of this.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[cosm]

I wonder how they will handle the translation from a C# sharp into something a bit more maintainable?

I know its cool to bash Microsoft on here, saying C# (or do you mean C##, must be new :) isn't maintainable isn't really fair to the language. Perhaps the project's (MySpace that is) overall structure is poorly designed, but that doesn't make the tools it was designed with unmaintainable. Am I missing something?

Great

[microbee]

One more name I don't have to hear about.

Re:Great work if you can get it

[blair1q]

I doubt it. Apparently they mined it for about a $billion in revenue in a partnership with Google's ad bureau. They probably didn't hit anything like the original targets they projected for it, but they probably made a respectable profit on it.

And nothing of value was gained

[oldmac31310]

by a company of no value!

Facebook is, what $35B now?

[billstewart]

Sure, its value is floating and fictitious, but apparently the market thinks it's 1000x more valuable than MySpace by now.

Re:Great work if you can get it

[bhcompy]

You buy a baseball player for $50 million. Baseball player generates you $100 million in increased ticket and merchandise sales as well as market exposure. At the end of his contract, you cannot sell him for anything. You get $0. Was this a financial victory? You don't need to sell something for more than you bought it for to come out positive.

Not quite as bad as it seems

[s7uar7]

According to this story from 2006, Google signed a $900m agreement to power the MySpace search between Q4 2006 and Q2 2010. The caveat is that it was, "so long as Fox achieves its expected traffic levels and other commitments." Either way Murdoch hasn't lost quite as much as the headline figures suggest.

Difficult to merge old & new media

[peter303]

Of a long list: ABC & InfoSeek, Time Warner & AOL, MicroSoft & NBC, Fox & MySpace; none is really thriving. AOL is trying to revive by itself again. MSNBC hasnt done much new in a long time.

My - who?

[nurb432]

MySpace is still around? I'm surprised. It hasn't been relevant ( or palatable ) for most of its dreadful life.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[natebrau]

Sorry- forgot to login to reply.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[cbraescu1]

one of the reasons why MySpace had problems was because they went with C# in the first place

Actually MySpace was first programmed in ColdFusion.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[cosm]

Gotcha, however I just don't see how the language itself is at fault at all. Ditching C# because new devs know other stuff, that's understandable, but ditching the language because of the language seems to be placing too much blame on the .NET stack and not enough on the million other aspects of the business.

Here's the formula...

[Jack9]

http://adage.com/article/digital/specific-media-ceo-talks-myspace-justin-timberlake/228494/

1. Buy MySpace
2. Have Justin Timberlake promote it
3. ???
PROFIT!!!

When is Facebook's turn?

[antdude]

;) And who is the next big social network star? :P

New Media Animation's take on this

[Animats]

Here's New Media Animation's take on this. They're a quick-turn animation house in Tapei, and they do one or two commentaries on the day's news every day.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[unity]

Actually it was done in asp/vbscript first. of course it was just a diskspace website back then -- when a few hundred meg was a big deal.

Re:Great work if you can get it

[XahXhaX]

That's assuming they did ever turn a profit from Myspace. Somehow I doubt it ever made them enough to recoup.

Either way this is still Newscorp we're talking about. $500 million is not going to bust the company, and I sincerely doubt any one of their executives lost sleep over this loss.

Re:Congrats to the Vanderhooks

[bill_mcgonigle]

but ditching the language because of the language seems to be placing too much blame on the .NET stack

I suspect it's more about the talent than the technology. C# and .NET are fine for corporate drone work (I say that lovingly, you guys get to go home at 5) but it's not likely to attract the kind of creative outside-the-box talent that it seems to take to innovate on the Internet.