6 Years Later, MySpace Was Sold At Low Price

6 years ago, News Corp. acquired the flourishing MySpace with $ 580 million, 6 years later, MySpace is low selling. Yesterday, MySpace CEO Mike Jones confirmed in the company’s internal e-mail, MySpace has been sold to the U.S. digital media company Specific Media by News Corp. at about $ 35 million low price. 6 years time, MySpace the old boss of social networking, the value has shrunk by 94%.

Mike Jones announced in the e-mail sent to all MySpace staff, that News Corp. and the U.S. digital media companies have reached a final agreement, the later will acquire MySpace in the form of cash and stock, News Corp’s shareholding in MySpace will drop to less than 5%. Mike Jones also said in the mail, MySpace will be a series of restructuring after the transaction, and will continue to layoffs, current MySpace’s 450 employees may be dismissed by about half. And two years ago, there were 1,400 employees.

MySpace was founded in early 2004, is a social networking site, which offers blog, personal homepage, personal space, electronic photo albums and other network services. In July 2005, News Corp. bought MySpace with $ 580 million. In December 2008, MySpace reached its peak, when the monthly unique visitors reached 75.9 million, becoming the world’s largest number of users of social networking site. But then due to differences in philosophy, direction confusion and other reasons, MySpace lost in the competition of new social networks such as Facebook, the number of users continued to drop. In May this year, MySpace users have fallen to about 30 million, in the two years, the average monthly loss of users more than 1 million.

“The Internet is changing every day, but obviously MySpace could not keep up with the pace.” An industry source said that with the rise of the microblogging represented, with more freedom and richer social networking sites, the original blog social networking sites are bound to face enormous challenges, but MySpace did not promptly adapted to this change, so declined. Once Internet users abandon a site, it is hard to attract back, so how MySpace’s future will be is hard to say. Innovation Works CEO Kai-fu Lee also evaluated MySpace sale event, said, “This is the fierce competition of the Internet speed.”