News Corp sells MySpace for $35 million

News Corp has sold music and entertainment website Myspace to an obscure ad-targeting firm, dropping a one time internet success whose steady decline has been an embarrassment for the media conglomerate in recent years.

In March, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was in talks was in talks with online music site Vevo.com for a sale or spin-off of its loss-making 'social entertainment' site MySpace, which had seen worldwide traffic shrink by nearly 30 per cent in the last six months (See: News Corp in talks with Vevo over MySpace fate).

Murdoch had paid $580 million in 2005 for MySpace, which was then one of the hottest properties on the internet; in 2006; it used to account for 80 per cent of the total social networking traffic, while then newcomer Facebook was a distant second with a 7.6-per cent share.

Things changed dramatically over the last five years in the world of social networking, with Facebook today accounting for more than 500 million members, followed by Twitter at 200 million accounts.

MySpace lost its way after News Corp redesigned the web site and re-branded it as a 'social entertainment site.' It had just around 60 million in March, down from 90 million in October 2010 when the changes were introduced.

Analysts had estimated at that time that MySpace would fetch less than $200 million for News Corp, perhaps as low as $50 million.