WebProNews

Social networking site MySpace will officially launch in France this Thursday. The company has been running a beta site in France. The launch is viewed as a broader move into Europe.

MySpace will be competing with Skyblog that sprang from a French rap radio station. As of November Skyblog had 7 million unique visitors while MySpace had 1.3 million according to comScore Media Metrix.

On the global scale MySpace had 82.6 million unique visitors in November while Skyblog had 13.2 million.

The U.K. is currently the most popular market for MySpace where they had 6.9 million users in November. France is the second European country the company has done business in. They have a beta site in Germany that should launch in a few weeks and an Italian site that could be ready in two months.

Media company News Corp purchased MySpace in 2005 for $580 million and their expansion into Europe provides an opportunity to increase their global network of users. "In terms of international expansion there will be a lot of activity in Europe this year," a MySpace spokesman said.

One blogger pointed out an early problem with the French site. "On the website, no doubt you will see a full-fledge social network site MySpace built it in the past few months, but I observed that there are not much local (French) videos originally uploaded from France's members that I expected. When a social network site is target in building a large video audience, it is a bit of disappointing to see the quarterly results MySpace achieved for the last few months."

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Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.