BigShinyThing

According to the New York Times media blog, the deal prompted News Corp’s President Peter Chernin to claim that, “In one fell swoop, we have paid for two-thirds of our Internet acquisitions.”

News Corp paid $649m for MySpace last year and has spent a total of $1.3bn so far on Internet companies.

Other media companies are following their lead. The Financial Times today reports that MTV-owner Viacom is in the frame to buy MySpace rival Bebo and the company has also been linked with a bid for college student site Facebook. The social networking trend also continues to explode with the latest Bright Idea being a site for the older generation. The founder of Internet job site (and dotcom survival story) Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, launched Eons.com earlier this month for the 50-plus crowd. The site comes complete with an obituary alert…

According to a profile of the social networking site in Businessweek, MySpace is the runaway Internet property of the moment — and it’s getting bigger all the time. MySpace currently has 43 million users, with 150,000 new ones arriving every day. A major driver of growth on the site is its affiliation with music — there are currently 10,000 pages for UK bands alone and Madonna launched Confessions on a Dance Floor on MySpace. Bands like Arctic Monkeys have built their careers using p2p sites like MySpace instead of conventional channels like radio to spread their music. Both acts have MySpace profiles. Ten percent of all advertising impressions across the Internet happen on MySpace — twice as many page views as Google. All NewsCorp have to do now is the leave the site the hell alone…

The Independent on Sunday reported this weekend that News Corp has apparently come over all Big Brother at newly acquired community site MySpace. Users have complained that references to rival video swapping site YouTube were mysteriously deleted and downloads from the site led to blank screens.

By removing access to YouTube, execs at MySpace are definitely missing a trick. MySpace has built up a key reputation in the music industry as a place to communicate with other musicians and share music. YouTube is already the fastest-growing video site online, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Its monthly visitors more than doubled from October to November, reaching 1.1 million in November. The site only began operating in February 2005.

In a typical clash of old media vs new, users have responded to this the only way they know how: by complaining loudly. One wrote,

This is sooo like Fox and News Corp to try and secretly seal our mouths with duct tape.

Following some 600 complaints and threats to switch allegiance to rival sites such as Friendster, News Corp restored the links. However, MySpace managers still shut down the blog forum on which the members had been complaining. That’ll do it.

UPDATE: shortly after this story broke, News Corp announced plans to introduce video downloads as one of many new services on MySpace designed to nuke the competition. Because that’s what media moguls do.

Variety reports on how Rupert Murdoch’s recent internet acquisitions place his News Corp. at the centre of the latest DotCom era. The company has spent some $1.5 billion on Web properties since lauching the Fox Interactive unit back in July. News Corp. signed its third major net deal this week, buying online videogame media company IGN Entertainment for $650 million in cash.

The deal comes after the purchases of Myspace.com parent Intermix Media for $580 million and college sports site Scout Media. As Variety points out, with the reach and videogame content of IGN; social networking of Myspace; and sports, news and entertainment content from Fox properties, News Corp. could easily put together a portal that would rival the likes of Yahoo! and AOL.

The only missing piece of the puzzle is a search engine and Murdoch already rumoured to be stalking online video search company Blinkx. Wall Street is watching with interest to see where News Corp. goes with its online strategy. According to Richard Greenfield of Fulcrum Global Partners:

While other major media companies are simply extending their traditional media properties online, News Corp. is aggressively ‘buying’ its way into a more comprehensive Internet strategy. The big question now centres on what exactly is News Corp.’s overarching ‘vision’ for its news acquired Internet properties and how well/quickly will it be able to integrate all its Internet pieces.

When the company’s annual results were announced last week, Murdoch stated his intention to spend as much as £1bn on internet acquisitions and that online is now a key part of the media empire’s future strategy. New Corp purchased myspace.com, one of the fastest growing online community sites, last month.

The purchase of Blinkx - which in true Dotcom style was founded by Suranga Chandratillake, a Cambridge computer science graduate - would provide search capacity for the Fox internet portal and could give News Corp the edge in what could be the Next Big Thing: search engines for finding films, TV episodes and news clips.

Murdoch warned a group of US newspaper editors back in April that the industry had been ‘remarkably complacent’ about the impact of internet use of newspaper circulation. He admitted that, ‘I didn’t do as much as I should have after the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same thing, quietly hoping this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn’t, it won’t, and it’s a fast-developing reality that we should grab’.

It makes perfect sense for Blinkx to link up with Fox: it already uses video clips from the network. Murdoch, amongst other media commentators, has repeatedly stressed the potential of matching the volume of content produced by a media company such as his with the possibilities of distributing it via the net. Certainly, if the content owners don’t do it there are plenty of peer to peer services, such as Bittorrent, which will do it for them and not necessarily legally. Only yesterday, the BBC found that a Swedish site was distributing unseen episodes of Ricky Gervais’s Extras.

The deal also places News Corp at the vanguard of podcasting and video blogging - services that Blinkx can facilitate.