News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced at a media-investor conference sponsored by Citigroup Inc. that he plans to turn the media company's recently acquired website, MySpace.com, into a full-fledged competitor to portals such as Yahoo!.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch plans to add free video downloads, revamp an instant-messaging program and eventually offer internet calling to the social-networking website. Those features are available on major web portals, such as Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, which dominate both web usage and online advertising sales. Murdoch said the goal of adding such features is to expand the time that users spend on MySpace, increasing the opportunity to sell advertising.
According to comScore Media Metrix, MySpace.com -- popular among teenagers and college-aged students -- has amassed 47 million members since its launch in January 2004, and in December had 32 million unique visitors. By comparison, Yahoo! had 127 million unique visitors in December.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Murdoch took a jab at competitors as being outdated. "The portal model is in danger of becoming out of date," he said. "Young people know exactly what sites they want to go to, and they go there. They don't have to work their way through Yahoo!'s or MSN's home pages."
Meanwhile, The Independent is reporting that MySpace members are angry at News Corp. for reportedly censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites.
Subscribers claim that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The alleged intervention by News Corp. provoked a storm of angry posts in online blogs as well as threats to boycott the site. News Corp. reportedly restored the links, but shut down the blog forum shortly after.
A spokesman for MySpace told The Independent it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.