MySpace “Worth $15 Billion” When Sold For $35 Million, Says Co-founder
(Updated) MySpace was worth much,much more than the $35 million that Rupert Murdoch sold the site for in 2011 according to co-founder Chris DeWolfe. “He made a big blunder in announcing our potential revenues”, DeWolf told The Telgraph. “He went to Wall Street and said, ‘Myspace will do $1 billion of revenue and $250 million in profit’. The same year, Facebook lost $250 million on zero in revenue."
The News Corps push to monetize the site at the expense of user experienced doomed the site, according to DeWolfe. YouTube "didn’t have any ads at all back then because they wanted to let it run, let it grow. We had the second largest video site in the world after YouTube, but we had ads in front of every single video. Whenever I asked to reduce them, six months of analysis needed to be done on how much revenue we would lose”.
"Myspace traffic was bigger in the US than Facebook’s," said Dewolfe. "This is as recently as 2009. Facebook was worth $20 billion or $30 billion then, Myspace was worth at least $15b billion, so shame on you for letting $15 billion go to waste and selling it for $30 million a year and a half later”.
lol
I remember when Myspace was King. Now i don’t think people even remember myspace anymore as they are so focused on Facebook and Twitter. A shame, because Myspace was far superior artistically to Facebook. Facebook was for mom and dad, Myspace with its impressive graphics, eye catching video viewing and high quality music reproducers was for true artists and young people. Not to mention Myspace even had customer attention which Facebook doesn’t have. I believe they have erased many previous members profiles for possible downsizing reasons–profiles that took years to make, all wiped out because of monetary reasons. Now previous members have no reason to go back to Myspace even if they wanted to. How Myspace became less popular than Facebook is unthinkable to me…But they have truly committed a form of corporate hari kiri which could have been avoided if they had only diversified to a more family, wholesome version of itself…Maybe launch a “Facebook” type version of Myspace so that everyone would want to join, not just teenagers and artists. I’ll say it again, Myspace was the BEST social network on the internet artistically speaking. Oh well, even The Roman Empire fell.