News Corp. is reportedly offloading the moribund MySpace to Specific Media for a cool $35 million.
As Bloomberg’s Andy Fixmer notes, the sale effectively rids News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch of a website that has fallen way behind rival Facebook in the social networking space.
Indeed, Murdoch acquired MySpace in 2005 for a whopping $580 – which was viewed as a rather lucrative deal at the time.
But now News Corp. obviously has to make do with a paltry $35 million, even though it was gunning for an obviously unrealistic $100 million.
So, what does Specific Media get out of the deal?
Well, the 34.9 million monthly MySpace visitors are expected to provide a (captive?) audience for its network of online ads.
Still, the obvious question is: how long can the sinking MySpace stay afloat? Word on the street is probably not very long, at least in its current iteration.
And that’s why the troubled social networking site may be forced to axe at least half of its staff in the context of any deal.
