Murdoch makes his presence felt on the Web

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 21 Sep 2006 at 10:22

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch is in an expansive mood when it comes to his Internet properties. Speaking to an audience in New York, Murdoch predicted that MySpace Video will overtake the market leader YouTube in 60 to 70 days.

This is a big claim given that only two months ago YouTube said it was serving 100 million clips a day and claimed to account for 60 per cent of all videos watched on the Web. And although the UK accounts for only a small proportion of the total traffic, Hitwise reports that YouTube has around 60 per cent of the British video sharing market compared with 5.5 per cent for MySpace Video.

However, with 'only' 20 million unique users per month, YouTube may be vulnerable to the MySpace effect whereby a site drawing traffic from only a small proportion of the site's 100 million reported users will get an enormous boost.

Recently News Corporation's chief operating officer Peter Chernin told investors that the likes of YouTube have been getting a free ride from MySpace traffic. He warned his rivals, 'If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it's Flickr, whether it's Photobucket, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace, there's no reason why we can't build a parallel business.'

In his speech, Murdoch also announced that MySpace China would launch within the next 12 months. The project will be overseen by Wendi Deng, Murdoch's wife. MySpace China will be a joint venture with local businesses who are expected to deal with any complaints.

Many US web properties such as Google and Yahoo have come under fire in Washington for their dealings with the Communist authorities. This is unlikely to deter Murdoch who famously pulled the BBC from his Star TV service in China as it was deemed to be too critical of the authorities.

Murdoch also remarked that he did not see a need to distribute content from his News Corp empire - which, lest we forget, includes Fox Studios, Fox News, Sky television and a host of newspapers around the world - through Internet portals. Asked why he hadn't agreed to push his plethora of media outlets through with large aggregators of online content, like Yahoo or MSN, Murdoch said he did not feel it was necessary to build traffic.