There has been a lot of talk about the decline of Myspace and of possible Myspace sales and mergers. Now we have something a little more specific (though unconfirmed) to consider.
People with knowledge of the situation say that News Corp. is in talks to give Vevo a majority stake in Myspace, according to a report from Bloomberg. “The talks are preliminary and an agreement may not be reached, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly,” reports Andy Fixmer. “Under the scenario being discussed, News Corp. would exchange the Myspace social network for a stake in a new venture, the people said. Vevo.com is one of several parties looking at Myspace, two of the people said.”
Vevo is a joint venture among Sony, Universal, and Abu Dhabi Media. It has a partnership with Google/YouTube, in which the two share ad revenue.
Vevo only launched in late 2009, and it is already one of the top web video properties. According to comScore‘s list of top U.S. online video properties last month, Vevo took the second spot, just behind Google Sites (in other words YouTube). While the difference in views was drastically different between those two (144,058 compared to 51,025), there’s a good chance that a significant amount of the YouTube views can actually be attributed to Vevo content, as Vevo videos appear all over the world’s largest video site. If you ever search for music videos on YouTube, there’s a good chance that you’ve watched some Vevo videos.
With that, a Vevo-owned Myspace would seem to make a fair amount of sense. I think it’s safe to say that one of the biggest things Myspace has going for it at this point is its video content, much of which is music-oriented. A Vevo ownership would mean instantly more Myspace video views I would think. In fact, Myspace already has Vevo video content on it itself.
For example, the band TV on the Radio premiered a new music video on MySpace, but now if you go to their MySpace page, it’s showing a Vevo-branded player for the video.
Myspace has basically conceded to Facebook in terms of social network, choosing to become more of an entertainment hub, comparable to an MTV.com.
