Murdoch admits News Corp buying MySpace was a "huge mistake"

This story qualifies as a "Captain Obvious" moment for a lot of people. Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, told the company's shareholders at a meeting on Friday that buying MySpace was a "huge mistake". AFP (via Google) reports that Murdock also admitted that News Corp "proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way."

In hindsight, MySpace was pretty much doomed from the start. Sure, it had a huge user base of people at one point but the user interface and terrible design choices for the social networking site left a lot to be desired. That's where Facebook came in with its clean and clear design and its much more manageable user interface that made it easier and more fun to use than MySpace.

Murdock, who has a lot of things on his mind lately (you may have heard something about phone hacking in the last couple of months) said that after News Corp paid $580 million to purchase MySpace in 2005, "We could have sold it for $6 billion a month later." We highly doubt that he would be able to get that much of a profit but there's no doubt at all that News Corp basically let MySpace flap in the wind with little to no effort to improve the site until it was far too late.

Now, singer Justin Timberlake and Specific Media are the proud owners of MySpace after purchasing the site earlier this year for $35 million. The new owners still haven't gone into detail about what they plan to do with the site, which quite frankly doesn't bode well. Perhaps the MySpace brand should just go away.