Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss on the decline of MySpace and Beb. Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Intermix Media and its MySpace website in July 2005 was arguably the moment the world started to take social networking seriously.
Despite the astonishment of his old media rivals at the $580m (then £331m) price tag, the acquisition was vindicated by a deal with Google beginning in October 2006, which guaranteed News Corp $900m in advertising revenue over the next three and a half years, providing certain traffic targets were met. Come the end of June 2010, the Google deal dies, and with it nearly half of MySpace's revenue.
Google has already intimated it isn't benefiting from the deal, though MySpace's new chief executive, Owen van Natta, played down the importance of the agreement at the recent All Things Digital conference, saying improving user experience was the priority. But he may want to think again. They all show MySpace in decline - whether it's in terms of time spent on the site per user, or number of page views. The Guardian Open Platform. How Guardian Tech readers detailed Oracle and Sun's buyups.
Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, announced on Monday morning, was one of those things that happens regularly in journalism: a huge story, breaking just as we were preparing the Technology section (which, though it appears in Thursday's paper, needs to be complete by Tuesday evening).
We'd need a big story, of course, about what the implications of the takeover. But I also thought that it needed something else; both Oracle and Sun are famously acquisitive, having bought dozens if not scores of companies in their lives. So, I thought, it would make sense to have a table of the major acquisitions by each company. Only problem was, who would do it?