Twilight of the media moguls? Not for this guy. With the $580 million purchase of MySpace, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is betting he can transform a free social network into a colossal marketing machine.
“Murdoch had ventured online before, but those forays were mostly unhappy, including the near-debacle of a failed $450 million bid for PointCast, poster child for the late 1990s push-media craze. Chastened – “We’re not a technology company,” Murdoch says, “we don’t need to be early” – he focused on building satellite broadcast networks, a bold bet on the future of hi-def TV and a hedge in an ongoing cold war with his cable distribution partners (read: Liberty Media chair John Malone). But by early 2005, with the skies under control, the Net loomed once again on Murdoch’s radar. Apple’s iTunes was exploding. Broadband was splashing video – a core News Corp. interest – across a growing number of computer screens. Search engines and P2P networks were ringing alarm bells for traditional broadcast network command-and-control. And online ad revenue had swollen to $10 billion annually, sweeping away doubters, filling war chests at Google and Yahoo, and bleeding old media Goliaths dry.”
- via wired.com
