News Corporation is reportedly willing to sell Myspace, the former social media market leader it bought back in 2005.
MySpace COO Chase Carey told Reuters that the company is open to a sale, partnership, or some other option.
“There are opportunities here to do 20 things… but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do any of the 20. If there’s something there that makes sense you ought to think about it,” Carey said.
Myspace’s recent redesign and rebranding efforts are an attempt to make the site more attractive to possible buyers, and Carey stuck by his position that the social networking platform had “quarters, not years” to turn itself around. “We need to deal with this with urgency,” he said today.
News Corporation, bought the US-based site for $580m (£332m), heralding what appeared to be the billionaire tycoon’s conversion from digital naysayer to web enthusiast.
Two years later, when News Corp was seeking a deal for the site – which at the time was vying with Facebook to capitalise on the explosion of social networking on the web – MySpace was valued at $12bn. But five years on from the deal, MySpace has been roundly defeated by its rival.
MySpace was visited by 80 million people in October. By contrast Facebook, founded a year after MySpace by four university students, has 500 million users, 151 million of whom visit monthly.
