MySpace bids expected this week

Six line up for knackered social network

By John Oates, 27th April 2011

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Rupert Murdoch is hoping for bids this week for his undead social network MySpace.

News Corp has been trying to get shot of the site, or work out what to do with it since soon after buying it.

The media giant bought the social networking and music site at the height of its popularity as part of the takeover of Intermix in 2005. Murdoch paid $580m for the company. Since then its users and revenues have shrunk.

There are six possible bidders for the unsocial site, according to the Wall Street Journal.

These include three private equity firms - Thomas H Lee Partners, Redscout Ventures and Criterion Capital Partners LLC. Other possible bidders include a Chinese tech firm and music video site Veevo, but the WSJ reckons Veevo is less interested now.

Criterion of course bought Bebo, for a small fraction of the $850m which AOL paid for the British teensite. The price paid for Bebo was not released but it was described as "an exceptionally uninspiring number" with almost total "value destruction".

MySpace was all but absent from News Corp's latest earnings announcement, except for getting the blame for larger losses at the Digital Media Group. ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Wednesday 27th April 2011 10:53 GMT

The Alpha Klutz

"what do they plan to do with it?"

If I were an eccentric billionaire (and last time I consulted the bank manager, -that's what I call my wallet- , I was not), I would buy MySpace and re-brand it slightly.

By putting a big picture of a special bus on the homepage and renaming the site "Day Release Glue Sniffers". A script would comp pictures of random members into the windows of the bus each time you load the page.

Then I would link the "Tom" account to an offensive trolling bot based on the TR31 military trolling protocol that exists in my imagination.

I would walk around the MySpace offices saying things like "This is our loading program, from here we can load any type of trolling we require." I would hire people to make me coffee, and other people to drink it for me. I would be so good at running MySpace.

I think people would really appreciate the new site.

Posted Wednesday 27th April 2011 09:58 GMT

A. Lewis