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News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch is making waves today after saying that MySpace could be sold for $6 billion - more than ten times the $580 million the company originally paid for it. He pointed out that MySpace has 130 million "users", having hit the 100 million milestone in August (not all these users are active, but the numbers are still large). They're growing by 8 million accounts a month, he says, and he expects 200 million users by the middle of 2007. What's more, the Google-MySpace ad deal is set to bring in $50 million in the 2007 fiscal year, $250 million in 2008 and $300 million in both 2009 and 2010. Of course, Murdoch is biased, and these valuations are all relative - at least he's not quoting the $10-$20 billion that one analyst thinks MySpace may be worth in 3 years.
Meanwhile, the rumor that Google may be holding back $500 million to deal with YouTube's potential copyright problems (like this one) turned out to be almost true - they've actually put more than $200 million in an escrow account to deal with all those legal costs. Even so, I bet they didn't expect one of the first YouTube lawsuits to come from tubing company UTube.