Rupert Murdoch seems confused when it comes to Myspace.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased Myspace in 2005 for $580 million. Six years later, the site is losing money, and is reportedly for sale. The price? Likely between $20 million and $30 million. That was a spectacular failure, if I’ve ever seen one.

In 2005, Myspace had a huge advantage in the social networking market. Now, it’s just a footnote in the short history of the industry. As I think about the sale of Myspace, I can’t help think about the AOL Time Warner merger. That was another case of a traditional media company failing to blend with an online entity. AOL still has a pulse, and has some potential for future growth. As for Myspace, I hope the next owners are creative.

The key to turning around the site will revolve around removing intrusive ads, becoming integrated with other sites, becoming mobile friendly, and finding the secret to reinventing the field it created. Personally, i have my doubts. If the new Myspace owners try it, Facebook has probably already thought of it.

Besides government intervention, Murdoch once again commented on the future on online media. Specifically mentioning the “theft” of material by aggregators, and the failure of the current business mode. Murdoch has recently stated his intention to move to a subscription service, and there have been rumors about removing Newscorp’s sites from Google and providing exclusive access to Bing (for a price, of course). For as right as Rupert Murdoch is on government intervention, he is wrong about his ideas for the future of media.

News Corp would certainly be able to sell subscriptions to its service, but how many? Their readership would drop precipitously and migrate directly to their free competition. Fox Business News is great, but why would I pay for that site if I can go to Bloomberg for free? As long as one strong site is free, they will pick up a trememdous amount of traffic and undercut the sites that charge for subcriptions. I would also be willing to bet that the free site’s ad revenue would rise tremendously.

There’s no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is a bright, successful guy. That’s why his latest idea seems to be risky: Removing all of his newspapers from Google’s index. News Corp owns well-known newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Sun. Murdoch seems to feel that Google is unfairly benefiting from News Corp’s content. In the past, Murdoch had mentioned ending their use of a free model and going to a subscription format. Now, another plan may have surfaced.

It appears that Microsoft has approached content providers and offered to pay them to index their sites and content with Bing.com and de-index their sites from Google. It’s certainly a bold initiative, but I question its effectiveness, and worry about the precedent it might set.

Companies like News Corp will likely receive a large payment from Bing, but will this be enough to off-set lost traffic? Let’s not forget that Google handles more than half of all searches on the internet, while Bing has less than 10%. Since newspapers derive most of their revenue from advertising, won’t fewer clicks mean less revenue? Although, while it could be bad for News Corp’s papers, it could be great for their competition. By removing News Corp and other content providers approached by Microsoft, the remaining providers will likely get more traffic.

Finally, we have to worry about corrupted search results. Do you really want to use a search engine that pays for content? If this model is successful, how will it be applied to other web sites? Will companies who refuse to pay be buried in search results or omitted entirely? I don’t see how this will improve Bing’s product, ie. its search results.

I typically use Google or Yahoo for searches, and have only used Bing a few times. If Microsoft does follow this model, they might see a decrease in the number of users who visit and trust their site, and the same could be true of their business partners.