News Corp squandered $15bn of investors’ cash, Chris DeWolfe tells Katherine Rushton
“[Mr Murdoch] made a big blunder in announcing our potential revenues. He went to [Wall] Street and said, 'MySpace will do $1bn of revenue and $250m in profit’. The same year [2007], Facebook lost $250m on zero in revenue. They were building user experience while we were forced to muck up ours,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
News Corporation bought MySpace for $580m in 2005, when it was bigger than Facebook. However, in 2011 it offloaded the company to a consortium led by singer Justin Timberlake after it plummeted in popularity.
He also expressed confidence in the future of Facebook and Twitter, which many analysts fear could one day follow MySpace.
“There is this meme that now that mum and dad are on Facebook, the kids are going and it’s not cool any more, but I still see people checking in. It doesn’t feel like they have a huge runway for [user] growth, but they will keep finding new ways to monetise,” he said.
