Remember Myspace? It was a hotbed for teenagers to connect and chat with their friends, and had some popularity with the adult crowd. Recently, Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter and he’s been fairly active.
Being that he is the main guy behind News Corp., the company that bought Myspace back in 2005 for $580 Million, a lot of people have been asking him about the social network. Murdoch came clean and said, “Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.”
Quite the statement, but seeing how quickly Myspace dropped to the bottom after being at the very top, many mistakes were definitely made.
“Fast forward to June, 2011: News Corp dumps MySpace for pennies on the dollar to investors including Justin Timberlake, who in an unscriptable life-imitates-art moment portrayed Facebook co-owner Sean Parker in the hit film The Social Network .”
“Buy, don’t build” can make a sound strategy, and MySpace was even arguably the market leader until 2008. Murdoch’s initial instinct was correct — even though the execution was awful — and it’s good that a total disaster like MySpace didn’t make him gun shy about his not-quite-as-big best last year on The Daily.”
Everyone makes mistakes. Social networking at the time was a very exciting and powerful medium, as it is today. Before the likes of Facebook rolled around, Myspace was growing at a rapid rate and the possibilities were exciting.
While things didn’t work out, the best thing one can do is learn from it and move on.
