The notion that a captain might go down with the ship or that storybook ideal that the band must play on until the very end, their very end, is certainly at odds with the current me-me-me culture. Of course, those aboard did not know their fate until the very end, and while not too protracted, it did not happen swiftly taking almost three hours before first impact to full submersion.

The Titanic, as the movie proved, makes for a timeless tale, one full of irony and allegory. It is in this tale of invincibility and unexpected demise that we find ourselves pondering digital re-enactments of the Titanic.

Last week when writing about the potential bubble and mega-billion-dollar digital media exits, a story came out that tells not all the unlike the Titanic, for now at least and luckily minus the actual loss of life. This is the story of the one that used to rule them all, MySpace.

As a business, it has languished, becoming a diminishing asset not unlike AOL’s dial-up business. It hasn’t gone away but despite the best efforts thus far, including numerous management and direction changes, the business has not pulled out of decline.

Unlike the Titanic, the event that signaled MySpace’s eventual rode to demise is not as concrete as hitting an iceberg. Many point to Facebook as that which led to the once-king of social’s doom, but hardly anyone, Mark Zuckerberg included, would have guessed his company would surpass MySpace. Like any great entrepreneur and overly driven, competitive individual, visions of grandeur absolutely ran through his head but the rational brain would not have agreed until much later.

Today, FBOK has 15 times the users that MySpace had at its peak, a number that shows little sign of slowing down; it also carries an estimated value $79.5 billion dollars higher than MySpace’s purchase price.

That MySpace didn’t have a specific event that signaled its end has certainly not made the ride down any smoother or any more palatable. In the digital world, its story is anything but unique. As others have noted before, it is as though the category killers and originators all end up surpassed at best and obscurity at the worst.

Who would have guessed that Yahoo! would not retain the number one spot in search? Who would have thought that Netscape would disappear? It’s one thing to lose your spot, but it is another to work there. What must it be like to work at MySpace? How does a company like Yahoo! turn itself around when they see so much bad press?

These are big ships on a trajectory  much like the Titanic. In today’s world, Apple alone stands as the rare example of a company that rose from the ashes to achieve an even bigger place of prominence. It’s the ultimate Catch-22 though — a strong business almost too closely associated with its strong leader.

Exactly what a strong business is not supposed to do. For example, can you name the CEO of Coke?

Whether MySpace’s story — thanks to new owners Specific Media in conjunction with Justin Timberlake — can ultimately resemble an Apple versus that fabled ship remains to be seen. What we don’t envy though is the challenge of both still working there as well as the one who takes over the helm.

Here is what so easily happens — employees remember the good times. They look to management to help create that and to fix the culture decline with substance. Management doesn’t really care about fixing the business. They don’t feel they have the support of the people into their new vision. They endanger that support further by making a few mid-course corrections and a stream of layoffs. They might care, but it’s hard to really care as even upon taking the job they started to plan their next venture. In their mind, they are simply optimizing for being able to say look how many lives we did save (using the Titanic metaphor) as opposed to actually trying to have the ship avoid the iceberg once the warning bell has sounded.

This battle is playing itself out in companies not nearly as large as Yahoo! or public as MySpace. The foreboding, dread and continuous drain on morale almost ensures that those still there do so because no better alternative exists. The ship may go down but why jump off the boat if it looks like some form of life raft will still exist?

It is really is too bad that businesses like these don’t necessarily have an iceberg to point to. At least Napster could fight until the very end happily even though the knockout blow would come at any moment. For the rest who find themselves already sinking but not knowing why, theirs is that depressing but all-too-common story — not admitting the issues until all they can do is tread water.

Cross-published at DMConfidential.com.

Specific may have bought a real jalopy, but depending on how well the social network is fixed up, it could be a boon for the ad network.

It’s fitting that the acquisition news is all over the web on Social Media Day, but Thursday, June 30 also marks the end of News Corp.’s fiscal year — it’s understandable that Rupert Murdoch didn’t want that revenue black hole on his balance sheet anymore.

Originally acquired for $580 million, MySpace was pretty much given away for $35 million – when it first appeared on the auction block, News Corp. was seeking a laughable $100 million. Actually I’m a little surprised News Corp. didn’t pay Specific Media to get rid of it, though News Corp. is taking a minority equity stake in Specific.

The layoffs came quickly (I can’t believe people would be working for MySpace without an updated resume), with about half of the 400-500 employees getting the ax. How many rounds of layoffs (and CEO-oustings) have we seen during the long, slow, depressing decline of MySpace? I remember being surprised in the last two years any time I received a hiring announcement from MySpace.

The decline really stemmed from News Corp.’s takeover in 2005 and at its heart were display ads. The parent company was making hand over fist in revenue from chintzy display ads and a deal with Google to power search and contextual ads, but at the price of annoying users with poor site functionality (how many pages did you have to sift through to make a comment?). Believe it or not, Facebook has always held user experience above revenue (especially now after tripping over its privacy policy so many times) and that was why it stole MySpace’s users.

But now the oft-redesigned social network is Specific’s problem, and it’s blowing some commentators minds that an ad network owns a social network. Specific wasn’t high on the tech media’s radar; indeed, the biggest splash Specific has made outside of the ad tech world was a lawsuit that claimed Specific used (previously) hard-to-delete Flash cookies for targeting purposes — which was kicked out of federal court a few months ago with little fanfare coverage.

But Specific is a big-ass display ad network — a reach of 170.9 million U.S. uniques and 79% of the U.S. Internet population — known for its targeting and dating mining technology.

“Our Data Universe enables us to gather insights from more than 2.6 million sites worldwide, giving us visibility into the digital consumption of 550 million global users each month.” Specific’s website reads. “Because our data is proprietary, it’s unique. Differentiated data means differentiated audiences.”

I didn’t get an answer when I asked if Specific Media was planning to incorporate MySpace user data into its display and video targeting services — there may not be one at this point. In theory, Specific will be able to do what Facebook won’t – anonymize profile data to add to audience segments for targeted display campaigns, and enable advertisers to reach potential targets on MySpace.

We keep wondering why Facebook swears it’s not building an ad network even though it has such large tracts of data that would be a boon to targeted display campaigns — Specific won’t get the same kind of reach (the company claims it will reach 70 million users but 50 million is the media-sanctioned number), but it’s pretty sweet to have so many uniques traversing an owned property.

I’ve read more than a few articles suggesting you delete your MySpace profile now, and a few that say it won’t matter as MySpace has backed up of all that data (oh no, they have pictures of my emo period!). But can you imagine the vast loads of outdated, crap data sitting in MySpace’s back pocket? Most of it must be absolutely useless for mining or targeting.“Hey Jenny, we see you liked Fallout Boy five years ago — check out this new line of studded belts!

Honestly, I don’t think being MySpace being owned by an ad network is going to ward anyone off other than the most privacy sensitive.

MySpace offers a new outlet for these branded videos as well as the opportunity to monetize 67 million video streams monthly.

Finally, Specific has suggested it will offer advertisers “socially-activated advertising campaigns, enabling brands to turn their campaigns viral by allowing users to share their favorite ads with friends.” It could easily set up new ad products similar to Facebook that offer advertisers the ability to anonymously target based on demographics and related user-generated content.

“With [Specific's] emphasis on video and data, this is about access,” commented interclick CEO Michael Katz. ”They gain access to a lot of inventory for their video offering. They also gain access to some quality data including the search data and registration data.”

Tomorrow MySpace will lay off 50% to 70% of its 1,000 person staff, including a great deal of its international employees. Workers have known this was coming for a while as News Corp. continues to trim down the much-revised social entertainment site for an imminent sale. Anybody else having AOL-Time Warner deja vu?

It seemed every piece of tragic MySpace news signalled the death knell of the beleaguered social network, but it was definitely over when Facebook vet Owen Van Natta was unceremoniously ousted as CEO. Even his tenure seemed like a Hail Mary play, but he was sacked (by his own team) before he got a chance to throw the ball. Every cringe-worthy development since, including the DOA rehaul, has just been a series of painful last gasps.

This isn’t the end, because we’re past that — this is the funeral. This is the requiem.

I was actually adding some new songs to my MySpace band profile last night and was frustrated by the confusing and un-intuitive revised layout. Yet there are still too many pages to wade through to complete simple tasks. I miss that straightforward old profile, with the picture and messaging options on the left, music and biography on the right and comments at the bottom. (I don’t miss people “pimping” their profiles — what a disaster that was.)

I even miss the old logo. While the revised logo seemed clever at first glance, it was actually symbolic of social network’s state — nothing inside.

Five years ago, MySpace was a gold mine for independent musicians — a place where you could post streaming music, list your shows, connect with fans and network with other bands for touring.

But I can’t blame News Corp. completely for the social networks downfall — eventually there were just too many people, too many bands and too much spamming — users got plain burned out. British comedy show “The IT Crowd” nailed the feeling perfectly in an episode where the characters became addicted and then exhausted by the made-up social network FriendFace.

Chances are you were friends with a guy named Minger on MySpace, who made it a point to friend everyone he came across — I actually know him in real life and he’s quite a funny guy. But who the hell was Ducky? Millions of people must have been friends with him…

Oh yeah, there were all the wannabe Suicide Girls collecting friends (mainly immature young men) by the boatful by posting titillating but not explicit pictures. That heralded the rise of the original MySpace star, Tila Tequila. The world could have down without her.

I remember receiving nonstop friend requests from fake accounts connected to porn sites (I run into this problem less often on Facebook); there was a short period at the end of the real estate bubble where I was flooded with friend requests from real estate agents. It was a little surreal, but definitely encouraged me to shutter my personal profile.

MySpace wasn’t the first social network and certainly won’t be the last, but it was a transitional network during an age of social experimentation. MySpace let users see the potential inherent in social networking, but also the horrors: stalkers, spam, hideous flash ads, oh my. MySpace taught us what we want from a social network — instead of “discovering” people online, the majority prefer connecting with acquaintances met in real life.

It let advertisers get their first taste of social media campaigning, and the wise ones noted the line where engagement turned invasive.

And unlike Friendster, which just kind of faded away, MySpace’s decline was protracted and painful, offering numerous lessons for other social media ventures  – for example, user satisfaction trumps ad revenue and don’t get acquired by a giant media conglomerate (or at least not by News Corp.).

MySpace’s requiem, particularly at the beginning of the new year, is further proof of the end of an era. No longer is social networking something the young’uns are doing on that crazy site, it’s become an essential component of the Internet, business and advertising. There’s no crazy site anymore — the social revolution is omnipresent.

So as the pink slips are delivered tomorrow, I’m going to raise a glass to MySpace and indulge in nostalgia. I’m going to relive the glory days, when I was fresh out of college and bored at my first office job, killing time by promoting my new band and sending friend requests to pretty young women who lived nearby and seemed to have good taste in music.

Feel free to share your MySpace memories below.

After former CEO and cocreator Adam Bain fled to become president of revenue at Twitter last month, News Corp spun off FAN into MySpace, but Swisher reports that leadership didn’t see any reason to keep it there, especially considering MySpace is going through an overhaul… Wait a second, didn’t that already happen? Or is MySpace simply in perpetual overhaul?

Swisher notes that FAN had a fair deal of suitors, but Rubicon was the “cleanest” option. As I’ve interviewed a few Rubicon execs, I can tell you hygiene over at the publisher platform is of the highest concern — Rubicon employees leave the pleasant scent of fresh-cut roses whenever they depart a room.

UPDATE, Tuesday, 2:48 P.M. EST: “With this ‘acquisition’ Rubicon is trying to play catch up with the other players in the market and it will be at least a year before anyone will know if the deal was even worth it,” commented Rajeev Goel of competing supply-side platform PubMatic, which just introduced a Data Firewall for revealing publisher data leakage. “We see this as a Hail Mary pass by Rubicon and an affirmation that they have failed to technologically innovate internally.”

TechCrunch reports that Bain is leaving the position of president of Fox Audience Network, News Corp.’s own ad network that monetized content on MySpace and IGN among other digital properties. Before that, he served as executive vice president of product and technology for Fox Interactive Media. Micheal Arrington claims Bain’s group was the sole “bright spot in an otherwise dismal group of digital products at News Corp.”

Also joining Twitter’s brave new revenue world is Google’s Brent Hill, who will run Midwest sales. He joins recent sales team additions Dan Coughlin, a Facebook vet who is heading up East Coast sales, and Amanda Levy, Yelp’s first salesperson and now the head of West Coast sales.

Paywalls will be effective in June are around News Corp.’s London rags, The Times and The Sunday Times. For a pound, a user can access www.thetimes.co.uk and www.thesundaytimes.co.uk for a day and for two pounds, a week.

While sites like Newsday have foundered with a paywall in place, News Corp. has had a healthy experience with The Wall Street Journal (though it should be noted that WSJ.com had a subscription plan long before the News Corp. acquisition). However, like its subscription-only brethren The Financial Times, WSJ is a business-related publication that subscribers can claim as a business expense (as they’re likely to do with the rumored $17.99-per-month WSJ iPad app).

But consumer dailies, as Newsday has proved, are different beasts. Why would a consumer pay for content he or she can likely get elsewhere?  Paywall advocates swear that consumers will subscribe to publications that produce local-centric content — but Newsday has put a dent in that theory, being primarily focused on Long Island, NY.

London’s a mite bigger than ‘gisland and there are plenty of free sites covering the happenings (for news, you’re better off with the BBC News website anyway (and I like the Guardian). Sure, certain bloggers may not be as high quality writers as The Times (though quality at print journalism outfits has been questionable for some time — not that I’m biased), but it’s still FREE — and Internet users show time after time that they don’t see any reason to pay.

Paul Carr puts it bluntly — Murdoch’s lost his marbles and both sites will fail. Pretty simple reason — whether in print or cyberspace, newspapers and magazines are held aloft by advertising, not subscriptions. You tell me, marketing pros — why on Earth would you advertise on a subscription pub when there’s a free site with similar content?

It’s interesting that Murdoch — who loves to compare Google to a parasite and has threatened to de-index content from the Google News site — is paywall experimenting with his Brit pubs instead of his American ones, such as The New York Post. Perhaps he’s not all that confident in the paywall move — there’s certainly no reason for him to be, unless Carr is right…

The remaining MySpace top brass coaxed employees to stop working on their resumes last Thursday and come to the courtyard of the Los Angeles headquarters — employees in other locales got to watch on the telly — as they unveiled MySpace’s new slogan: “Discover and be Discovered.”

After clearing the air about Owen Van Natta’s departure, execs detailed “Discovery,” the new area of emphasis on the site. When a user logs on, he or she will be inundated with the latest cool stuff on MySpace — movie trailers, games, music, etc. — based on what their friends are into. This feature will be rooted in the recently improved activity stream, which sorts updates into categories such as events and photos while introducing updates on what music friends are listening to.

Apparently MySpace doesn’t want to call it a recommendation engine, but it sounds like a pushier version of StumbleUpon (“ShovedOn”?). Granted, teenagers are still pretty big MySpace users and certainly the most open to the suggestion of peers. (We called it “peer pressure” in my day — and we were told to ignore it… The times, they do change.)  I wonder if this initiative is more to keep the social network afloat because the comeback potential seems limited.

But I know you only care so much about the latest last-ditch effort to save the beached whale — you want the filthy details about the CEO-sacking! News Corp. Digital Chief Jon Miller was willing to satisfy your bloodlust, complaining at the meeting that Van Natta wasn’t moving fast enough for News Corp.’s taste. Like, OMG — he didn’t turn things around completely within a year? What a loser.

Miller also cited bad vibes among the executive triumvirate installed back in April 2009, particularly between new co-president Jason Hirschorn and Van Natta. Hirschhorn was supposedly on his way out, and his failure to be launched apparently infuriated Van Natta.

On a side note, apparently when you join MySpace now, cofounder Tom Anderson is no longer automatically added as your first friend. (A person commented to The Onion,  “Well, that’s a shame. I’ll never forget the feeling I got when I immediately deleted him.”)  Tom’s MySpace page hasn’t had a status update since the holiday season.

Did News Corp. finally axe Tom? I’ll bet you’ll find his body next to Jimmy Hoffa’s…

Facebook vet Owen Van Natta has stepped down as MySpace CEO with less than a year under his belt. It’s a bit of a shock because Van Natta seemed to be in the middle of a major makeover, switching MySpace from lagging social network into a social entertainment hub through acquisitions such as iLike and Imeem.

But last week MySpace reported a loss of $32 million in the quarter. The entire digital category of parent News Corp did a $73 million dip, which could have only made old man Murdoch all the more cantankerous.

A TechCrunch interview with Van Natta from the Davos World Economic Forum two weeks ago is a bit chilling — he gives no sign that he’s thinking of leaving and has vision aplenty for the site. Chief Operating Officer Mike Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn — who came in with Van Natta in April 2009 as part of an executive shakeup — have been bumped up to co-presidents. Sources told TechCrunch that Van Natta wanted Hirschorn gone and had been feuding with News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller.

But let’s read between the lines: the shakeup has been shook up, and Van Natta has been pegged the scapegoat for a crap quarter. It’s kind of sad and shortsighted, really, because site re-invention is not something that happens overnight. A good deal of MySpace’s revenue loss comes from slimming down and excising the ads and excess pages that have been driving users away.

Alas, my violin for Owen is pretty tiny. Sorry, buddy, this kind of stuff happens when you get in bed with News Corp. Maybe you and Cofounder Chris DeWolfe, who also had an unceremonious exit after being hailed as the golden boy, can catch a drink and console each other. The other founder, Tom Anderson (he was my first friend!), is apparently still at MySpace — at least one captain must go down with the ship.

Google News signed a deal to host AP’s content in August 2007, but the contract expires at the end of January. Back in October, AP CEO Tom Curley expressed some snide dismay that Google wasn’t seeing things AP’s way, and apparently the negotiations went south from there.

Google released a statement today: “We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP.”

Some of the old stuff is still there, but you won’t find any AP stories dated later than Dec. 23. AP had no comment.

It’s the latest development in the pissing contest between Google and the news industry. At the heart of the matter is the eternal question, who gets to call the shots: content creator or distributor?

In particular, it seems a fitting retort to recent comments and moves by News Corp., such as chatting with Microsoft about de-indexing its content from Google News. In this context, Google’s reply could be read as, “Do it; see if we care.”

AdChina, an online advertising network in China, has completed its series B round of venture financing led by Richmond Management, along with co-investors GSR Ventures and News Corporation. The amount of funding was not disclosed. The financing will enable AdChina to grow its staff and invest in several new technology and commercial initiatives planned for 2009-10, according to the company.

“We have long been aware of the talented team behind AdChina and are excited to support their ongoing success.” said Wendi Murdoch in a statement. She led News Corp’s investment in AdChina and is the wife of Rupert Murdoch, whom has had a long and expensive eye on the Chinese market.

Driven by a rapidly expanding online user base and growing domestic consumer spending, the market for online display ads in China is growing in excess of 30% per year on a $2 billion base for 2008 according to iResearch.

AdChina says it reaches 300 million, or 85% of the Chinese Internet users and has been pioneering many new models for branding and performance-based online advertising. The company closed a $10 million round back in 2007, led by Mayfield China.