The Myspace Implosion - A View from Australia

Image via CrunchBaseStephen Bartholomeusz, writing in The Australian Business Spectator has a fairly standard analysis of the recent half a billion dollar loss that Murdoch's News Corp had on the sale of Myspace.

This week News did sell Myspace, for a paltry $US35 million, and put an end to the haemorrhaging that business was experiencing and the embarrassment the continuing presence of the business within the News portfolio had created for Murdoch.

see Murdoch's Myspace humiliation (free signup required)


from Business Spectator

The conclusion is the interesting bit

(the question is)..."News and its peers try to manage the transition of their traditional media businesses into the digital age. News’ big experiments with digital media – Myspace, the iPad-only newspaper The Daily, and the paywalls around its UK newspapers – haven’t inspired confidence in News’ ability to manage that evolution."

No they have not and they probably never will.

The Daily: An iPad Electronic Only Newspaper from Steve and Rupert.

"Steve Jobs will join Rupert Murdoch on stage at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to reveal iPad newspaper The Daily.."

"The date for the event is said to be January 19..."

"The Daily is specific, especially for Murdoch’s media powerhouse News Corp., as it will have no web or print edition – the only way to get it will be on the iPad, where each edition will cost $0.99."

Tellingly most of the comments on this Mushable article say that it will be a flop.

My rating? It will depend on style and content. A big issue the app will have to overcome is an almost universal dislike by most online readers of anything that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. does online. We have to assume that Rupert is aiming for the 'corporate' market or rather all those middle aged men who have bought an iPad to look groovey and for whom 0.99 cents a read is chump change.

My take? It's going to be a stuggle but News Corp. have deep pockets so it will not be pulled after a few months if the numbers don't look good.

And by the way, Steve comes up smelling roses all around: doing his bit for the traditional journalists, bridging the generation gap (in geek terms anyway), and Apple makes more app money.

From Musable.com

Jobs and Murdoch to Unveil “The Daily” January 19 

via ScribeFire