Will Murdoch swap MySpace for Yahoo! stake?

Tabloidtakeovertastic...

By John Oates, 20th June 2007

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Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is considering swapping MySpace for a stake in Yahoo!

The talks are ongoing, but have been hit by the departure of Terry Semel earlier this week.

According to Murdoch-owned The Times, News Corp will hand over MySpace in exchange for a 25 per cent stake in Yahoo!. The search and portal giant has been accused of lacking direction in recent months but is still worth $37bn.

Murdoch paid $580m for MySpace in 2005, which would be some rate of return.

Yahoo! would benefit from the deal in gaining News Corp's content and a big social networking site - although Facebook has rather overshadowed MySpace in recent months.

It could be the story has more to do with Murdoch's bid to takeover the Dow Jones group. In May he offered $5bn for the group which owns the Wall Street Journal, among other titles.

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Posted Wednesday 20th June 2007 20:03 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Why not Facebook?

Worth about $3B perhaps (much cheaper than Facebook). It's a way cooler site and has a way cooler vision and i wouldn't be surprised if they eventually eclipsed facebook (much as google has eclipsed yahoo).

Of course no amount of stupidity would be too much for the yahoo executive team. And yes - Yahoo products are shitty. Every freaking product (maps/mail/search) is objectively and aesthetically worse than equivalent product from Google.

Posted Wednesday 20th June 2007 17:49 GMT

David

Censored to death

MySpace censored to death.... nope - can't see how that's a bad thing.

Posted Wednesday 20th June 2007 16:09 GMT

Anonymous Coward

He's laughing all the way to the bank

MySpace is awful, at least in design. It's like a nightmare living in a teen's badly decorated bedroom plastered with boy/girl band posters, and MySpace doesn't exactly make it easy to make pleasing profiles.

It's no wonder MySpace is mainly a teen thing.

God and that awful scrolling background deal. That went out of fashion with Netscape and Geocities!