News Corp’s MySpace is hitting the jackpot according to Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield. He raised News Corp’s earning estimates based on the companies pending sale of DirecTV to Liberty Capital.
Greenfield says that MySpace is generating more than $30 million a month in revenue, $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He projects that over the next year monthly revenues will more than double.
Not a bad investment when you consider Rupert Murdoch and News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million in July 2005.
MySpace also inked a lucrative deal with Google worth $900 million to provide a Google search platform and advertising space on the social networking site.
Things may not be all rosy for MySpace, though Greenfield warned that the company could lose in excess of $75 million when they launch Fox News Business Channel.
In addition next month two American hackers have made it known that they will expose security flaws in the MySpace Web site. The two go by the phony names “Mondo Armando” and “Mstaschio”.
They explain why they are targeting MySpace on their site:
The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose Myspace as a hive of spam and villainy (since everyone knows that already), but to highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites populated by users of various levels of sophistication.
We could have just as easily gone after Google or Yahoo or MSN or ZDNet or whatever. Myspace is just more fun, and is becoming notoriously dickish about responding to security issues.
Even with a few chinks in their armor MySpace’s bottom line will be just fine.
