by Jonathan Strickland | February 3, 2011
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I feel awful for MySpace. It was the first social network I ever joined. I convinced friends to sign up, found folks I had lost touch with and connected with people who lived on the other side of the country from me. At the time I joined, it was the best option I had available â€" Facebook reserved profiles for high school and college students and I had graduated years earlier.
In 2005, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s mega corporation, purchased MySpace for around $580 million dollars. At the time, it looked like MySpace would continue to reign supreme among social networks. It had a much larger customer base than Facebook. Friendster was already flagging. What could possibly go wrong?
What went wrong was that News Corp backed the wrong horse. Facebook’s popularity boomed as it opened up to allow anyone to create a profile. Strategic partnerships and innovations gave Facebook the advantage. It caught up to and then surpassed MySpace’s number of users.
Like many of my friends, I gravitated toward Facebook gradually. It had a cleaner interface. I didn’t have to worry about visiting a friend’s profile and being bombarded by awful music (or having to look at an eyesore of a profile layout page). It was relatively easy to find the content I wanted to see. When Facebook launched apps, I knew I wouldn’t be returning to MySpace often.
That experience seems to have been repeated across the Web. And now, according to VentureBeat, News Corp is looking to unburden itself of what was supposed to be the jewel in its Web-based crown. This comes after a massive redesign effort that renewed focus on MySpace’s platform as a place to discover music and other forms of entertainment. It also follows a massive layoff that ended with about half of MySpace’s employees out of a job.
Will another company or individual swoop in to purchase MySpace? And at what price? At this point, most people are wondering how much money will News Corp ultimately lose on the deal.
Have you ever used MySpace? Do you still have an active profile there? Are you surprised by this news (or surprised that it’s taken so long to happen)? Let us know!
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