Corporate media hexes MySpace

I was a late comer to MySpace so I never knew it in its early go-go days. But when Rupert Murdoch bought it along with sports publisher Scout Media and online video gaming company IGN Entertainment in 2005 I quoted him thus

"There's
no panic, and there was certainly no overpayment," he says. "It was a
very careful strategy to go for the two biggest community sites for
people under 30. If you take the number of page views in the US, we are
the third biggest presence on the Internet already.

"Now we're not the most profitable, or anything like it;
we have a huge amount of work ahead to get that whole thing right. And
we're working very hard to keep improving."

Whistling
in the graveyard. When eBay buys Skype I think, "OK, someone who has
built an Internet fortune buys a new property, they probably know what
they are doing". When someone who has admitted his failure to get the
net blows billions to "buy" audience, I think, "panic".

Its taken 4 years but with a 31% shrinkage in the latest survey, its not surprising that we get this. Murdoch poised to axe jobs at MySpace

RUPERT MURDOCH'S News Corp plans significant job cuts at its Fox Interactive Media unit, which houses the popular MySpace networking site, and has ditched plans to move the division into massive new headquarters in western Los Angeles, according to US media reports.

The savings push comes after the 78-year-old media mogul in April hired the former AOL boss Jonathan Miller to overhaul the internet unit, whose growth has stalled in the advertising downturn. Weeks later, he also replaced the two MySpace founders to revive the waning appeal of the site which has lost market share to its rival Facebook.

Apparently there was some overpayment after all.

About the same time as he bought these expensive trophies, the SMH ran this little puff.

Global media baron Rupert Murdoch is steaming ahead with plans
to dominate the internet, telling investors to expect his strategy
for conquest to be unveiled within weeks.

So much for domination; wrong thinking Rup. Murdoch doesn't get the net, AOL isn't the net, put 'em together and what have you got? More sackings to come. It'll take a year, but the deathwatch for MySpace is on.