Fascinating tell-all book on MySpace, found via Tech Crunch. Worth noting that MySpace’s position on the matter is: “This book received zero participation, zero access, and zero fact-checking from MySpace.”

The major tidbit is that in February 2005, Facebook founder offered to sell his new social network to MySpace for $75M.  As obvious as this “error” might be today, at the time, MySpace was a subsidiary of Intermix (formerly called eUniverse) with little cash on the books, so even if MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe wanted to pursue the offer, I doubt they could.  More importantly, I’d say, was DeWolfe’s decision to cash out when the company raised $11.5M from Redpoint (thus limiting his upside) and mainly, his decision to cap the value of MySpace in any sale of Intermix to $125M.   But, you know what they say about hindsight.

On my end, something else stood out:

June 2005: Viacom and News Corp vie for acquisition of MySpace. Viacom too slow, News Corp. does marathon weekend deal to buy company for $580 million. Ross Levinsohn from News Corp. leads deal from their side. Tom Freston leads from Viacom.

It’s interesting to see that companies don’t change or learn from mistakes.  Months after News Corp. bought MySpace, it also bought IGN, which Viacom was also chasing.

At the time, I was VP of sales at AskMen, who was just acquired by IGN a few months before in June 2005.  The day the deal was announced, I happened to be in NYC.  You’d think that Viacom would have learned from losing MySpace and moved faster on IGN, but it didn’t.  IGN had filed for an IPO, but ultimately, News Corp. paid $650M for IGN.  IGN had given options to us at AskMen after they bought us in a cash deal, so I ended up making 50% more from the IGN/AskMen deal via that acquisition.  I always had a soft spot for Rupert Murdoch, even when his leutenants piled on and sued me the next year.

Note: my new company WatchMojo.com currently supplies MySpace with videos, so it’s nothing but love now.

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