News From News Corp (NWS): MySpace Isn't Much Of A Business

Rupert Murdoch hoped that his big announcement yesterday is that News Corp (NWS) is opening up the development platform for its huge social network, MySpace. He hopes that this will counter a move by smaller competitor Facebook. Facebook’s enlistment of outside developers seems to have help improve his audience.

Murdoch’s property still has well over 100 million registered users while Facebook is well under 50 million.

But, another little comment Murdoch made probably stole the thunder. Wall Street had expected MySpace to bring in at least $800 million in revenue this year. That would  be modest given the number of pageviews that the property has. But, he bought that number down "I might say $750 (million) but it’s at least 30 times what it was the day we bought it two years ago," Murdoch said in comments picked up by Reuters.

Given that internet investor punching bag Yahoo! (YHOO) is a $6 billion a year business, the numbers from Murdoch take a lot of the air out of the social network valuation balloon.

And, someone said Facebook was worth $15 billion?

Douglas A. McIntyre