Media

A Brief History of the Murdoch/MySpace Disaster

Chuck Ansbacher | Friday 8 April, 2011 15:57

Maybe MySpace was doomed from the beginning. The layout was horrific, the experience was sloppy, and they even made you learn basic html in order to put sparkly animated gif backgrounds on your ugly profiles. If you’re like me and everyone else, once Facebook came along and provided a clean, clutter free, spam free alternative, you flipped the switch in a heartbeat and never looked back.

MySpace, to put it bluntly, sucked. I barely remember the experience, and, like you, I have no desire to relive it.

However, what I have every desire in the world to relive is the story of how Rupert Murdoch lost $580 million investing in and then completely mismanaging it. Do I relish in every Murdoch failure I can get my hands on maybe a bit too much? Yes, I do. But unlike The Daily, the coffin of which I’ve gleefully been hammering nails into a bit prematurely, MySpace is dead, with no hopes of resuscitation.

Yesterday Reuters provided a spectacularly in depth account of how Murdoch blundered his first and only foray into the social arena. It may fall into the TL;DR category for many, but if you enjoy languishing in the failures of Uncle Rupert as much as I do, it’s a day maker.

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