MySpace.com, the immensely popular social networking portal targeting 16 to 34 year olds, was purchased by the U.K. based News Corporation, a Rupert Murdock company, in 2005 for $508 million. MySpace.com was started in 2003 by Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe, and their programming buddies, several years after Anderson graduated from film studies at UCLA.
News Corp announced recently that they plan to integrate the site more tightly with its newspapers, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, and others. This points to a new trend in merging paper newspaper dailies with online social portals and blogs.
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In another report, google was said to have received 8.2 percent of its traffic from Myspace.com during the first week of May (2006). Both Google and Microsoft are said to be vying for partnership with MySpace.
Comment by brandblogs 05.26.06 @ 9:27 pmToday, May 27, 2006, we read in the Seattle Times that Rupert Murdock’s London based The Times newspaper, announced that it will be launching a U.S. version of the Times as part of its push to become international.
Beginning June 6th, the newspaper will be distributed in New York and New Jersey. The U.S. edition will re-package stories from the London office.
The Times editor, Robert Thomson, said that there has been a large increase in the The Times online readership in the U.S.
The Times purchase of MySpace.com in 2005, combined with rumored competitive offers of partnership with MySpace from both Microsoft and Yahoo, supports the trend of the dailies combining their business with online news distribution and social networking portals.
Comment by brandblogs 05.28.06 @ 6:04 pmPost a comment
