News Corporation sold its non profitable social networking site MySpace to online advertising company Specific Media.

In the year 2005 News Corp had paid $580m (£361m) for MySpace, but both users and advertisers abandoned the site for competitors like Facebook and Twitter.

The terms of the sales were not told but there were rumors that a low price of $35m was paid.

Specific Media informed that pop star and actor Justin Timberlake will have a share in the business.

He will play “a major role in developing the creative direction and strategy for the company moving forward,” the company said.

Specific Media was established in 1999 by three brothers- Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook – and is in Irvine, California.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace, it was a popular social networking site. But the business was ruined by competitors and in spite of trying to restore fortunes of MySpace, it ahs been a financial burden.

The Reuters news agency quoted a blogging site owned by News Corp as saying that MySpace has been sold to someone for $35m.

Specific Media said: “We look forward to combining our platforms to drive the next generation of digital innovation.”

Deficits

News Corp’s chief operating officer Chase Carey in November told that the damages at MySpace were “unsustainable”.

News Corp does not prints particular for MySpace but “other” segment too, which involves the social network, which reported a second quarter operating loss of $156m-$31 m bad than the last year.

The tracking company comScore told that MySpace had 21.8 million monthly US visitors in August 2005 compared with that of Facebook which were 8.3 million.

Facebook had 157.2 million as compared to 34.9 million members of MySpace, In May, users of facebook increased to 157.2 as My Space US as of MySpace which is 34.9million, said comScore. Facebook has 70 million members all over the world.