A hearty congratulations to Peter Chernin, Chief Operating Officer of News Corp as the new AOL CEO. What, you didn't hear about it? Sure you did.
Surely, you read Marshall Kirkpatrick's MySpace posting. Okay, maybe I'm jumping the gun here but consider these words:
News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors today that, “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.” MultiChannel News is reporting that Chernin said there is no reason why News Corp. couldn’t build parallel businesses, targeting YouTube in particular. “Given that most of their traffic comes from us,” he said, “if we build adequate if not superior competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them.”
or Marshall's excellent summary:
To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there’s going to be an increasingly aggressive commercial push on the site.
Marshall says "dangerously arrogant" but I say naah, it's part of the master plan. NewsCorp wants to turn MySpace into a giant walled garden complete with all the restrictions and we don't no stinking, well, stinking anything attitude.
In other words: AOL.
Brilliant! Now all we need is a giant billion piece mailing of MySpace CDs and life is good.
Hugh Macleod, paging Hugh Macleod: emergency cartoon required, aisle three.
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