Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has admitted the failure of social networking site MySpace, saying that it was “screwed up in every way possible”.
Since joining Twitter at the start of this year, the grumpy Australian has been particularly prolific on the social networking site and didn’t hide when talking about the musical networking site that suffered because of the popularity of other sites such as Facebook and Murdoch’s new favourite medium.
Tweeting about all sorts of matters relating to the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week, Murdoch posted a notable one about MySpace, which he bought for a gigantic sum seven years ago.
Murdoch spent $580 million on MySpace in 2005 and spent years and millions of dollars trying to compete with Facebook, but no matter what he did or whose phone he tried to tap, he couldn’t achieve any success.
He finally gave up the ghost last year, when it was sold to ample-trousered pop star Justin Timberlake for a paltry $32 million, just over 5 per cent of what Murdoch had splashed out in the first place.
Last year, during an annual shareholder meeting, Murdoch admitted: “I made a huge mistake? We bought it (MySpace) for $600m. We could have sold it for $6bn a month later.”
The fact that he didn’t remains a massive regret and now MySpace is reported to have only 30 million users, way down from its 74 million peak in 2008 and miles away from the billions that use rivals such as Facebook and Twitter.
Not even with Justin Timberlake involved it seems, can MySpace get its sexy back.
