It was the right bet on the wrong horse.
Six years ago, News Corp. made an ambitious gamble on the coming wave in technology, social networking, paying $580 million to buy MySpace.
They thought it was genius.
Now the media corporation is looking to unload by the end of the month what has become a digital albatross for a paltry $100 million (if they’re lucky), while rival Facebook is dancing its way to a $100 billion IPO.
Also read: Facebook, Twitter and the Bubble of 2011: Why It's Different
Was News Corp. dumb or just unlucky? And how did MySpace -- once bigger than Facebook -- go so wrong?
Experts and former executives say that MySpace never had a chance, even back in 2005, when it had far more users than Facebook. (Photo of Rupert and Wendi Murdoch with MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe)
Facebook required members to use their identities, while MySpace allowed for aliases -- and sexual predators.
Facebook innovated products, while 
MySpace stagnated.
Facebook had the right platform and the best engineers; MySpace did not.
And joining a big corporation like News Corp. didn’t help.
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“At a time when social networks weren’t settled, Facebook siphoned off the elite,” said Owen Thomas, formerly of VentureBeat and founding editor of Daily Dot, told TheWrap. “If you were college educated, Facebook became your default choice. MySpace became the low class, low-rent section of town.”
“MySpace was no Facebook, but News Corp. probably didn't know the difference -- the site was growing so fast when they bought it,” Robert Cringely, a technology writer and consultant, told TheWrap. “But it was growing with teenage users with limited buying power. By the time News Corp. noticed it was too late.”
A spokesman for News Corp. declined to comment for this story.
While Facebook was constantly adding new features and unrolling snazzy elements such as a news feed, MySpace failed to monitor its user base and crack down on spammers. Instead it allowed people to design their own profile pages and sign up with pseudonyms, which made the site appear chaotic.
Stories of sexual predators and overaggressive homepage ads took their toll, as privacy issues were not addressed. And it didn’t give users enough to do, whether through gaming or sharing posts.
Most fatally, it failed to exploit its greatest asset: its status as the go-to destination for music lovers, a place where bands such as R.E.M. shared their latest tracks with fans.
“Facebook is a technology company and MySpace was a media entity which confused itself with being a social network,” Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, told TheWrap. “They had the audience and they could have launched the MTV for the next generation, but they didn’t understand what made them MySpace.
