MySpace Fire Sale

MySpace – the Internet’s abandoned amusement park, as comedian Seth Meyers so aptly put it – has been sold to ad-targeting firm Specific Media for $35 million, a far cry from its once $1 billion valuation.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, hoped to get $100 million for the website before the end of its fiscal year. It will retain less than 5 percent of the business, according to All Things Digital.

Specific already reaches 170 million online users and may pad that number with the addition of MySpace, according to The Wrap, but it will be an uphill climb considering MySpace’s dwindling user base, dropping 10 million members in January. MySpace has 77 million members versus Facebook’s 700 million.

MySpace was once considered too big to fail, but complaints about sexual predators and an obsolete platform are likely reasons for the exodus to Facebook.

Tom, the one friend every user got when signing on to the service, hasn’t updated his page since March (www.myspace.com/tom).

“Tom,” of course, is co-founder Tom Anderson, who along with fellow founder Chris DeWolfe, each put together a group of bidders to buy back the company, but failed. So did Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who backed out for several reasons, according to ATD.

Specific is planning to cut Myspace’s 500 staff by 50 percent. Two years ago, the company had 1,400 employees, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Facebook has Google trying to nip at its heels, launching its own social networking site June 29. The company, of course, hopes it will fare better than its last social media venture, the now-desolate Wave.

Also meanwhile, rumblings of a Facebook IPO are pegging the company’s future market cap at between $70 billion and $100 billion.