Miscellaneous 'Shoe: MySpace Grows Up, Microsoft Pays Dearly For Facebook Stake, Blogs Are Hot

-- It's kind of fun watching a young Internet company figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Recently MySpace teamed up with Skype. Now the News Corp-owned social networking site has announced it will offer an online gaming channel with Oberon Media. With Facebook showing far more growth and creativity, these kinds of partnerships are very needed. MySpace's owner has received some grief for how it has let the competition (see below) steal its thunder. These types of partnerships will help unlock some of the value in MySpace's $580 million price tag.

-- Speaking of (possibly) overpriced social networking sites, Facebook today got $240 million from Microsoft for a 1.4% stake of the company and rights to sell ads on the popular site. At that price, Facebook is valued at $15 billion! Microsoft held off Google to win the ad deal. The company has been expanding its presence in online advertising: Microsoft recently bought aQuantive for $6 billion and last year paid somewhere between $200 million and $400 million (analyst estimates) for in-game advertising company Massive. Microsoft's stock closed up about 1.1% today and is up about almost 9% in the last six months.

-- Netflix added 286,000 customers in the third quarter and its profits exceeded expectations. How has the company excelled at a time of increased competition from similar DVD-based outfits as well as increased digital competition? A good ol' fashioned price drop. Prices were lowered by $1 per month. In the fourth quarter, Netflix expects to add another 300,000 to 500,000 subscribers to its current level of 7.03 million.

-- Continuing with the new media angle...Standard & Poor's asks if blogs will be the next big acquisition target. The business model certainly is nice: Critique the work of and use as talking points the news of the old media, work with a decentralized and office-less organization and use cheap blogging software that does most of the heavy lifting. I have to wonder, though, if it wouldn't be possible to build rather than buy. As the Huffington Post has proven, a new market entry doesn't take long to rise to the top of the rankings. As soon as old media figures out how to correctly blog (hint: don't write like your journalism professors taught you, don't treat it like it's going to be in print) they can make up a lot of ground. Blogging is a state of mind more than anything else. The blogs mentioned in the article will work better as mainstream media outsiders and the owners know it. Gawker Media, TechCrunch and BoingBoing will lose their anti-establishment souls if they sell out. Old media companies seeking growth, new readers and new identities should save their money and build blogs themselves. Case in point: The New York Times' Freakonomics blog.