Staci at paidContent.org puts it nicely:
Among the biggest questionmarks around Fox Interactive’s pending $580 million acquisition of Intermix and its top property MySpace are whether the social network’s aura — and membership pace — can survive being owned by News Corp and how the company will make money from the deal.
To underscore her point, Staci cites a story in the Village Voice with the headline “Their Space? A rumor that a community-built Web behomoth has become a corporate trap.”
Another paidContent post provides additional context on the MySpace deal and News Corp.’s broader Internet strategy, extracted from the company’s recent earnings call. A follow-up post adds more thoughts on potential News Corp. acquisition targets in the search sector.
A key challenge for News Corp., which has set aside $1 billion for Internet-related acquisitions, will be to reconcile the potentially conflicting strategies suggested by the following two statements.
On one hand we have Teri Everett, a representative of Fox Interactive, describing News Corp.’s approach to managing MySpace: “We’re just going to go on letting them do what they do, since that’s what’s made them so successful.”
On the other hand, we have Rupert Murdoch telling Wall Street analysts that his priority is to monetize his company’s traditional media assets in an online world where a startup like MySpace (or a competitor) can quickly build (or lose) an audience of 24 million—and where the demands of community-building may conflict with those of corporate media models.
“We have tens of billions of dollars of asset value in our news, sports and general entertainment businesses. While we monetize this value daily in the form of our TV shows, channels, films, books and newspapers, our priority now, which is our mandate, is to perfect a plan that will monetize them across the world on the Internet.”
Regardless of whether News Corp.’s plan ends up “perfect,” a dismal failure or, most likely, somewhere in between, its evolution will shed light on the future relationship between “old” and “new” media.
Mitch Shapiro at 1:49 AM|Comments(0)
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