Poor Rupert. News Corp has seen falling revenues and his previously brilliant decisions are now being questioned. Now his social networking tool for teenagers is being left behind by the new annoying fad in social networking, Facebook.
Latest figures show that Murdoch is being beaten in the fight for social networks. MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook. Three executives recently quit the one-time darling of the internet and there is speculation its co-founders will follow.
MySpace's loss of status as the cool place to be is an object lesson in the notoriously fickle internet, where today's cultural icon is tomorrow's passing fad. From humble origins in 2003, the site led the so-called "Web 2.0" revolution in which users could create their own profile pages and share content with friends. Murdoch's purchase of MySpace for $580m was seen as a masterstroke as membership continued to soar, with celebrities and politicians joining the craze.
But then came Facebook, founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, which soon snowballed with an older and apparently more affluent demographic to steal MySpace's crown. Gradually newspaper coverage of social networks switched from references to "MySpace and Facebook" to "Facebook and MySpace". The rise of Bebo also undermined MySpace's dominance, while Twitter is among the latest novelties eating into users' attention spans.
