Murdoch: MySpace Now Worth $6 Billion

MySpace founder Tom Anderson is making even more friends.

Rupert Murdoch: MySpace is Now Worth $6 Billion
Tuesday November 14, 2:25 pm ET

Speaking with investors at a meeting in Sydney, Australia, yesterday, News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS – News) Rupert Murdoch reportedly said that the company’s MySpace unit could now be sold for $6 billion, or about 10x the $580 million News Corp. originally paid for the business. The $6 billion was reported in research notes this morning from UBS analyst Aryeh Bourkoff and Credit Suisse analysts Jolanta Masojada and William Drewry.

According to the reports, Murdoch said MySpace now has 130 million users, growing 8 million users a month; he expects 200 million users by mid-2007. Bourkoff says revenue from its advertising relationship with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG – News) should bring MySpace $50 million in fiscal 2007, $250 million in fiscal 2008 and $300 million in both 2009 and 2010.

Meanwhile, wannabe patent troll Friendster can’t even hold down a tiny little office on a third-world Pacific island. No wonder all the hottest Filipina babes are switching to MySpace.

(Via Yahoo! Finance.)

Akismet Killer Spam

A new piece of comment spam making the rounds breaks popular WordPress plugin Akismet, by blocking access to the Akismet spam queue.

Symptom: Your Akismet spam queue displays nothing but the number 35.

Solution: Go into phpMyAdmin from your hosting control panel and browse wp_comments. Find and delete entries from “Bush” using email address “main@yandex.com” and URL “http://google.com”, like so:

Once you’ve deleted all such entries, your Akismet spam queue should be accessible again.

Spam that punishes anyone who filters it. Vicious.