Did somebody just pay $580 million for MySpace?
MySpace, whose juvenile users frequently lift material from other websites without asking for permission or even sending courtesy links in return, has been bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a shocking $580 million. The price-tag reminds me of that hapless German publishing company - Snookered + Dumb - who bought Fast Company for a cool half billion bucks, or Yahoo’s $5 billion acquistion of Broadcast.com, the deal that turned the world into Mark Cuban’s personal playground.
In less than two years, MySpace has emerged as one of the hottest sites on the Web. It has more page views than Google (GOOG ). And with 22 million members, and a growth rate of 2 million a month, it stands to rival MSN (MSFT ), Yahoo! (YHOO ) and AOL (TWX ) as one of the major destinations on the Web.
With a heavy focus on music, it has become a part of daily life for teenagers and young adults nationwide. Members create highly personalized home pages loaded with message boards, blogs, photos, and streaming music and video. People use it to stay in touch with friends and meet other people. Driven by the expressiveness of its members, the social-networking site has emerged as an important channel for online advertising. TV shows and new music are often debuted on MySpace.
As much as I hate MySpace and its bandwith-stealing, barely literate, as-cool-as-MTV-tells-them-to-be members, it’s a great place to watch teenagers express themselves. It’s like a gigantic, disorganized focus group. An unfocus group (TM, R, C).
