Michael
Dec 9th 2009, 08:10 PM
The rise and fall of MySpace
By Matthew Garrahan
In summer 2005, having spent the best part of four decades *building a newspaper, film and television empire, Rupert Murdoch decided that the time had come to get serious about the internet. As founder and chairman of News Corporation, one of the world’s biggest and most powerful media conglomerates, Murdoch controls an eclectic portfolio of businesses ranging from The Sun newspaper to the movie studio 20th Century Fox. Yet with young people “watching less television and reading fewer newspapers”, as he observed that summer, News Corp desperately needed a bigger presence online.
Article (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd9ffd9c-dee5-11de-adff-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html)
So Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace.
This is a very interesting article about Murdoch buying/running MySpace, but also about the doomed nature of business purchases of this type. The story might well by about Time-Warner's purchase of AOL. Everything seems so similar.
Both of these deals were celebrated in the business pages and on the stock market, but I remember laughing at both deals as soon as they were announced. It was obvious to me that both AOL and MySpace had already peaked and were on a downhill slope just as their valuation and sale price was at its maximum and were bought out. These deals just showed how clueless the big mega-corporations were about what was happening on the net.
That's one of the reason's I've become so jaded about the future of things like Facebook. The track record so far is that the internet creates some impressive looking companies, but they usually don't last very long at the top. Heck, I remember when Google didn't exist and Yahoo looked like it was going to totally dominate the net forever with its 'portal' page. :shrug:
By Matthew Garrahan
In summer 2005, having spent the best part of four decades *building a newspaper, film and television empire, Rupert Murdoch decided that the time had come to get serious about the internet. As founder and chairman of News Corporation, one of the world’s biggest and most powerful media conglomerates, Murdoch controls an eclectic portfolio of businesses ranging from The Sun newspaper to the movie studio 20th Century Fox. Yet with young people “watching less television and reading fewer newspapers”, as he observed that summer, News Corp desperately needed a bigger presence online.
Article (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd9ffd9c-dee5-11de-adff-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html)
So Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace.
This is a very interesting article about Murdoch buying/running MySpace, but also about the doomed nature of business purchases of this type. The story might well by about Time-Warner's purchase of AOL. Everything seems so similar.
Both of these deals were celebrated in the business pages and on the stock market, but I remember laughing at both deals as soon as they were announced. It was obvious to me that both AOL and MySpace had already peaked and were on a downhill slope just as their valuation and sale price was at its maximum and were bought out. These deals just showed how clueless the big mega-corporations were about what was happening on the net.
That's one of the reason's I've become so jaded about the future of things like Facebook. The track record so far is that the internet creates some impressive looking companies, but they usually don't last very long at the top. Heck, I remember when Google didn't exist and Yahoo looked like it was going to totally dominate the net forever with its 'portal' page. :shrug: