Tom still waiting for his payday

Well, this helps explain why Rupert Murdoch has gone cool on Myspace, the media mogul's most successful investment of the last decade. The social network's founders, who made a tiny fraction of the $630m paid by Murdoch's News Corporation to the site's then-owner, are holding the media conglomerate to ransom: Nikki Finke reports Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe are holding out for a $50m package to remain both with Myspace another two years after their current contract runs out. The impasse over the founders' outrageous pay demand helps explain Murdoch's ambivalence towards the phenomenally popular social network.

On the one hand, News Corporation execs believe that social network sites have been, if anything, underhyped; Murdoch's reportedly put a value of $12bn on Myspace, representing a twenty-fold increase in his investment; and he values the founders enough that he canned Ross Levinsohn, the News Corporation exec to whom they, begrudgingly, reported.

However, Murdoch has publicly humiliated the Myspace founders with offhand remarks about the popularity of their main rival, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook; Anderson and DeWolfe were even forced to watch Facebook's 23-year-old founder, the aging mogul's latest internet crush, talk about the future of news at a company management offsite; and he's thinking of cashing in his Myspace profits by folding the site into troubled Yahoo. These media tycoons are so unsentimental.

So, what happens now? Probably a few tense weeks of posturing, and then an accomodation. The personal reputations of Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, everybody's first friend on Myspace, are too closely intertwined with Myspace's continued success. And News Corporation, admiring though it might be of Mark Zuckerberg's achievement, is stuck with Myspace, at least until it finds some larger portal into which to merge the site. Let's be real: the Myspace acquisition is the deal that put Murdoch back on the cover of the business magazines, looking dynamic for a 76-year-old. He can't afford to quibble too much.

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