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News Corp wants $100m for Myspace

Tim Green
News Corp wants $100m for Myspace

Expecting five bids by the end of this week.

The WSJ has spoken to insiders who say that News Corp is moving closer to a sale of the social network that was once the hottest firm in the world, but is now struggling to define itself in a Facebook-dominated present.

Among the names quoted by Reuters as interested are private equity firm THL Partners, Redscout Ventures, Criterion Capital (which owns Bebo), Chinese Internet holding company Tencent and Myspace co-founder Chris De Wolfe.

News Corp paid more than $580 million for Myspace in 2005, and for a while it looked like a miraculous purchase.

However, after hitting over 130m members at its peak, MySpace faded and a series of re-launched didn't help.

Indeed, its traffic shrank to 62.6 million visitors in February from 88 million in October 2010.

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If News Corp does sell, it will represent a huge loss to compare with the one it took when it sold Jamba to Jesta,

But not as big as the one AOL took on Bebo, which it bought for $850m (£515m) in 2008, and sold for $10m (£6m) to private equity firm Criterion Capital Partners.


Tags: facebook , myspace , news corp , M&A , Social

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