MySpace, one of the founding fathers of the social web looks as if it will be up for sale again. MySpace has had a chequered past and has been in steady decline since the powerhouse that is Facebook entered the scene. News Corp. Purchased MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, it would have been extremely difficult to have bought the social network at a worse time, the unwitting News Corp. had no idea, like the rest of us, that this was the peak of the MySpace era.

MySpace however did have at least 4 years from the time of initial sale to News Corp. to when users started dropping the platform. The failure of MySpace is completely down to the poor decision making of the team, they didn’t take notice of the small time players that were up and coming such as Facebook and this has cost them in a big way. To put a value on how much this naivety will cost News Corp. it will be at least $480 million and that is not taking into account any of the losses that MySpace has made over the past 6 years.

Over the past few years they have seen profits plummet and mass redundancies being made, this is being reflected in the resale price. News Corp. are hoping to get around $100 million and this seems to be at the top end of optimistic in my opinion.

Who are the contenders for the sale? Well word on the street is Redscout Ventures, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Criterion Capital Partners LLC, which also owns Bebo are the main players in this bid. It will be very interesting to see what they think they can do with the platform, I would be shocked if they could get people to drop Facebook or any other platform for MySpace. I think it is a case of they have had their chance and now it is over for them.

When did you drop MySpace and is there any way that you would go back to the platform. Tell us in the comments below.