Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of MySpace, is going to “auction off the rights to its internal search engine to either Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.”
Two interesting details of this story:
(1) Murdoch bought MySpace for only $580 million last year. This strikes me as a ridiculously low number, since they can sell hundreds of millions in advertising every year to an audience of 57 million members that visits dozens of times every week and is in an age bracket particularly susceptible to marketing. This would be the equivalent of owning giant billboards on every mile of every freeway going through the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metropolitan areas. In addition to that, as the article points out, users voluntarily contribute to a huge database of demographic and consumer preference informaton that other companies would pay a lot to access. Perhaps Murdoch is just “flipping” MySpace, building up its advertising capacity and then selling the site at ten or even twenty times what he paid for it. Either that … or we’ll see a sudden fivefold increase in Fox News’ ratings among 14-year old girls.
(2) I just laughed at the BBC’s attempt to describe MySpace to people that might not know what it is: “MySpace allows anyone to build their own homepage for free, listing topics such as their favourite bands, top books, general interests, and then get in contact with other like-minded folk.” Like-minded folk? It’s not like that’s a common British turn of phrase. Has the BBC hired 19th century Southern plantation owners as writers?
