At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Rupert Murdoch has been tweeting his ruminations about the “digital tornado” unleashed by the innovations presented.
The News Corp chairman said the technologies unveiled at CES were more innovative than ever, “some great, all disruptive”, and suggested Facebook might join the “big three” of Apple, Google and Amazon, who were “dominant and now growing… Plenty of others good, but not in same league.”
That seemed to prompt more than a few jibes about MySpace, which News Corp bought for $580m only to sell it for $35m six years later, from Mr Murdoch’s many critics on Twitter.
With typical candour, the media mogul admitted that the company “screwed up in every way possible”:
The FT’s LA correspondent, Matthew Garrahan, detailed the rise and fall of MySpace in a 2009 FT magazine story, which described the bureaucracy and bad decisions which befell the once-dominant social network.
[In 2005] Murdoch was delighted with his deal. “He spent an enormous amount of his personal time on it,” says Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, MySpace’s parent company. “There was no question that he was enthusiastic.” The MySpace team were similarly upbeat, he adds. “It was unbridled enthusiasm. We were all arm-in-arm to change the world.”
But in a few short years, that enthusiasm turned to embarrassment. Ross Levinsohn, who was given responsibility for running MySpace at News Corp, clashed with the site’s two founders. He told the FT:
“I had a vision about what I wanted to do with the company and it definitely conflicted with what Chris and Tom wanted to do. I said to Peter and Rupert: ‘If you want me to run the company, let me run the company.’ I think they felt Chris and Tom were talent – and that we should have left them alone…. [The site] had been built pretty quickly and using sub-standard technology. So we spent a lot of money on that and shored it up. We got a lot of resistance from the MySpace guys … they felt they knew what to do.”
…
According to several former MySpace executives interviewed by the FT, ideas for features and applications became bogged down in bureaucracy. “It became very difficult to remove pages from the site [because of the effect on revenues],” says one former senior MySpace executive. “We had to get approval for everything.”
Jim Heckman, the former chief strategy officer of Fox Interactive Media – and the architect of the MySpace-Google deal – says blaming News Corp for the site’s demise is “an anecdotal smokescreen. By that time, the jig was up … people had already started moving over to Facebook en masse.”
(Read the full story here.)
MySpace is now owned by Specific Media and Justin Timberlake, the singer. But don’t write it off altogether. Ahead of Google’s integration of its social network more deeply into its search results, Comscore figures show that in the US at least, MySpace is still attracting more visitors than Google+.
