How Low Has MySpace Sunk? It's About To Be Sold For Less Than $30 Million
from the destruction-of-value dept
Way back in 2005, when News Corp. bought Intermix, which (believe it or not) was the parent company of MySpace, we focused on the fact that Intermix was big in the spyware/adware business, and didn't even pay that much attention to the MySpace part of the deal (silly us). Believe it or not, that was the point at which MySpace was just really starting to catch on. The whole thing cost $580 million, and a year later, one of the company's founders, Brad Greenspan, sued News Corp., claiming that there was fraud involved and MySpace should have been valued at $20 billion. Of course, the story since then has been one of a big downhill slope. While MySpace had always focused on music, over the last couple of years, at every music conference I've attended, people have joked about the fact that no one uses MySpace at all any more. And so it's come to this. Reports are now spreading that News Corp. is looking to unload what's left of MySpace for between $20 and $30 million. Oh, and in a bit of interesting timing, Facebook is preparing to launch its new music service next month. How quickly things change...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: social networks
Companies: myspace, news corp.
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
My [______]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I'm curious to see if anyone bothers to buy the site. It's kind of like buying a cargo shit with a 100 foot wide hole in the hull...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Yep. That's MySpace alright.
I honestly can't see why musicians would continue to use myspace with options like bandcamp.com out there. Sure, you've got a little more freedom to toss around animated gifs and slow-yer-compy-to-a-crawl plugins, but if you're serious about getting your music heard, there's a ton of better options.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Hmmm... I'd say that a) "nobody" is clearly an exaggeration and b) maybe if they stopped defaulting to the easy option and say "find us on bandcamp.com" instead of MySpace then the fans would look there instead. New sites only get big due to public awareness of them - look at Facebook, nobody knew what that was when Myspace was at its height...
If you think that's an exaggeration, consider, that I for one *never* follow a MySpace link because I know how horrible that site is on the eyes. If a band wants my attention, they have to be more imaginative.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
I would never buy a cargo shit, ever!
Hole or not.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Where did Myspace go wrong?
They seemed to be doing rather well as Facebook was coming up, but in the end, they were uprooted by other social events. I've heard some people liked the easier on the eyes look of FB, others just the fact that all they have to do is use FB as a social medium.
So what's going to happen to MS now? It's lost so much ground to other sites, it's not funny. Could they ever make a comeback?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Where did Myspace go wrong?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Where did Myspace go wrong?
If you want to know the history of what happened to MySpace it's pretty simple. Someone started a whisper campaign saying there were people taking advantage of children on Myspace. It was picked up and hyped by the media. People fled to FaceBook. Recently FaceBook tried this same tactic against Google. It back fired and FaceBook got caught. Recently Google began limited external testing of its new social media site Google+. So you can expect more BS smear campaigns, against google, from facebook in the near future.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Where did Myspace go wrong?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Seriously though the first time I saw MySpace the thing that struck me was that the pages were a mess, everything goes and it reminded me of AOL webpages in the 90's.
Also it was a paradise for account hijacking.
Maybe people just got tired of the crappy tastes others have.
God why are people so fascinated with blurry photos(shinning faces using photoshop) and stars everywhere? why?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: myspace = aol
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
News Corp. took a bath?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Source: Portal 2
That quote should read:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Sorry.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
People eventually catch on that there's NO substance!
The whole American society is winding down for lack of interest, not least because of the visible example of The Rich who are able to make demands without the least exchange of actual labor in return. What's needed, as ever, is to take away /money/ as the sole goal in society, and that's easy to do merely by reducing the manifold excesses that The Rich get. Rest of us would actually be fairly happy to do even farm labor if PAID in proportion to the actual value of food. -- That's an "economics" tip for you, Mike.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: People eventually catch on that there's NO substance!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: People eventually catch on that there's NO substance!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: People eventually catch on that there's NO substance!
So the content he posts on the blog in the form of written articles have been a fiction of my imagination? Who knew...
"I've seen many personal websites started with big plans on the first page, which lead to pages blank except for some variant of "this is where I'll put my neat projects", and nothing else ever, soon as they reckon up how much /work/ those projects will actually require."
I've seen plenty of projects posted on the likes of Kickstarter that have gone to fruition and rewarded both fans and the authors with exactly what they demanded. Your point?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: People eventually catch on that there's NO substance!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Umm...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
FB sucks btw.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
what killed My__
Personally I hate Faceblah with a passion, but it has become the de facto social networking interface. My wish is that some day social networking would be done across a platform that any company could tap into -- My__ profiles could 'friend' Facebook profiles, which could share pictures with people on Friendster, etc. Kinda like IRC. Then this whole issue would go away. If you wanted to draw people to your service, you'd have to offer better service, and if your friends wanted something lamer, that's fine, you could still use the service of your choice.
But I digress.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
MS = OldSchool
I've got FB now because everyone else does (Like why Windows is so popular; it's not the best, it's just the one every one uses).
I feel bad for MS since that's the old school link to some serious Internet history; but it didn't change and grow in the right directions. That's the way of social media.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Welcome to the 21st century internet: a trash heap of worthless and trendy ways of communicating or selling something.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
In other words, welcome to the 21st century internet, same as the 20th century internet.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
MySpace Sunk
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: MySpace Sunk
It's just called your own homepage on the web - many ISPs offer it for free with your connection. Most people seem to have forgotten that this exists!
If you want to host larger files for download then you can use Dropbox (or similar) and avoid your ISP's storage/bandwidth limits...
As for the future of Myspace - see Geocities...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]