My former boss Eric Pooley published a juicy, access-laden cover story about Rupert Murdoch in the current issue of Time Magazine. There’s a small amount of news, like Murdoch confirming that he discussed combining MySpace with Yahoo (YHOO), a conversation he had with former CEO Terry Semel. Pooley also describes how Murdoch threatened to walk away if the Bancrofts didn’t submit a more reasonable response to his $5-billion bid to buy the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch also voices support for newly installed Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli. All in all, it’s a good read, with the cover line “The Last Tycoon”, after the Fitzgerald novel.
There’s also an intriguing throwaway line from Murdoch deep in the story, regarding MySpace. “It was an education for me, the way it took off,” Murdoch tells Pooley. “It was the cool young site. Now the average age is climbing.”
What’s intriguing about Murdoch’s point is that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe went out of his way to make a similar point to me Wednesday morning over breakfast in San Francisco. He told me 40% of MySpace’s audience is 35 years or older. The reason for stressing this is to counter the assumption that rival site Facebook has a better plan for growing beyond its youthful audience. I don’t doubt that more older people are using MySpace, and Facebook, for that matter. When I asked DeWolfe, however, what percentage of time spent on MySpace is attributed to the 35-year-old-plus crowd, he said he didn’t know but agreed with my assumption that the figure would be well below 40%.
I still doubt that adults, the kinds with careers to build and families to raise, will spend much time on sites like MySpace and Facebook in years to come. The owners of those sites disagree, of course. Their businesses depend on it.