I told him I thought that in spite of the fact that Mark Cuban is very smart and very rich, he could still be wrong.
Seems like I may have been right. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the price tag is $1.6 Billion and the suitor is Google.
Here is the kicker in the story:
Like Web browsers and search engines before them, YouTube and
social-networking sites are recognized as front doors to the Internet
where companies can grab users' attention, and to try to link them to
other services or hit them with marketing messages. News Corp. has
already turned MySpace into a lucrative ad and promotional machine; in
August, Google guaranteed MySpace and some other News Corp. sites a
minimum of $900 million in ad revenue over the next 3½ years under an
ad-brokering deal. Media companies have also been keeping a close eye
on YouTube as a test case at a moment when consumers' online-viewing
habits and corporate strategies are in flux.
Google paid 900 Million in guarantees to put ads into MySpace, and don't any equity. And now analysts are forecasting a valuation of $15Billion over time for MySpace. Got to be a relatively cheap deal to buy the underlying asset instead of just providing the ads...
And of course all those lawsuits... now Universal et al have to decide whether to try to get a piece of the action now by parlaying the lawsuit into a piece of the pie, or take the risk that the Google lawyers will drag a future action out for decades...
