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See also:"I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s…quietly hoping, that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.”
by Rupert Murdoch – News Corporation
It was a great statement, and few media business leaders would have been so courageously candid about seeing the light on the internet twice in the same decade. But it is also typical of the man that the Pauline re-conversion was immediately followed by action choreographed to demonstrate the new line, and persuade doubters of the Chairman’s determination.
On 15 July Fox Interactive Media was launched: the focus is on broadband enablement to deliver content from all of the successful Fox web sites, using personalisation and customised feeds. Like the Googlezon of EPIC 2014 legend ..., the aspiration is to become the “home base for users’ news, information, entertainment and community needs”. All of which might have been seen as the aspirational rhetoric of press releases, had not the Intermix acquisition followed very soon afterwards.
This deal is momentous. While its size is fairly insignificant, and while Intermix and Vantage Point Venture Partners have come away with a good price for the two-year-old company, the move puts News Corp into the heart of the new community environment on the network in a single bound. This will be as important for News Corp’s newspaper interests as for its film and television activities, and will have a tendency, if used in a thoroughgoing way, to change the positioning and the fortunes of News Corp’s web presence everywhere. Immediately, the acquisition doubles the user base of the company on the web to 45 million unique monthly users, once the aggregated usage of Intermix’s 30 sites is added to the News Corp mix.
But this is not just about user numbers. MySpace.com is a leader in social networking environments – and has earned a high value place in advertising rankings (it served 8% of all advertising on the web in June) ..."
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News Corp doubles web audience with $580m portal acquisition
by Daniel Farey-Jones in Brand Republic (Subscription - free 14 days trail)
