Rupert Murdoch has only been on Twitter for less than a month, but already has been making waves throughout the Twitterverse. Thankfully the ‘Wendi Deng’ fake account ding-dong detracted away from most of it.
Today, in a candid display of honesty from the man who brought us the News of the World and the phone hacking scandal, he took Twitter to accept the failings of MySpace, which News Corp. acquired back in 2005.
Here’s what he had to say:
Ouch. I feel for Tom. Oh wait, Tom isn’t there anymore. He’s over at Google+ causing stirs of his own.
MySpace, long thought to be on its way out after the News Corp. purchase, was back in the news this week after analytics firm comScore said that the once-social network is still doing pretty well.
The figures show that many were in fact still on the sinking ship of MySpace, while many of the life rafts of Google+ were laying bare and empty. While it is almost impossible to believe, MySpace still rakes in more traffic than Tumblr and Google+.
Many were surprised. “I have no idea where (and why) MySpace is getting so much traffic — still”, Om Malik of GigaOm said.
MySpace is still in decline, however, whether the numbers reflect it or otherwise. News Corp. converted the social network into a music hub. But instead of competing with the likes of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, it then had to face Spotify and Apple’s iTunes, amongst others.
But if you saw Murdoch’s tweet and gasped in horror, it has been no secret that News Corp. and Murdoch were critical of how they managed MySpace after it was bought.
During the News Corp. 2011 annual meeting, Murdoch himself made a frank admission. He defended the $530 million price tag that the company paid for MySpace, but said that: “[News Corp.] then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way”.
But at least we can take solace in the fact Murdoch and News Corp. “learned lots of valuable, expensive lessons” from the MySpace fiasco. If only it could apply the same principles to its print media.
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