When Rupert Murdoch paid US$585 million in August last year for the social networking site MySpace.com there were many respected media analysts who thought that the world's greatest media mogul might be losing his marbles.
But at the end of this year, Murdoch is looking like the savviest, most courageous media baron of the modern age -- timing his entry into the Internet waters with supernatural prescience.
A year after the acquisition, RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan predicted that the site could be worth US$15 billion in a few years as it adds to its 100 million registered users around the world and leveraged its popularity to become the primary media distribution channel in the world.
"Fifteen billion dollars in a few years? It is possible," Rohan wrote in a research note to clients.
As if to back up the potential of this new breed of Web sites that leverage the Internet's ability to offer consumers a plethora of content, Google paid US$1.6 billion for video sharing site Youtube.com while the Internet search leader saw its stock pass US$500 billion in value -- giving the company a value of over US$1.65 billion -- more than the combined worth of Time Warner and Walt Disney.
While no-one should be gambling their pensions on Rohan's prediction coming true, its undeniable that MySpace and other so-called Web2.0 sites are finally embodying the lofty predictions of Web hipsters in the first Internet boom.
That was way back in the infancy of the World Wide Web between 1996 and 2000 when everyone who could spell the word technology was predicting that the newfangled communications network would revolutionize commerce, media, social activity and every other facet of modern life.
When the online market for pet food and other essentials failed to immediately yield the expected billions, investors pulled the plug in the year 2000, prompting the great dot-com crash.
But the true Web evangelists never went away -- they stayed busy boosting computer power, broadband access and Wi-Fi networks, inventing effective search engines like Google and advertising models that reached commercially valuable Web audiences.
At the same time a generation of teenagers and 20-somethings adopted the Internet as their first choice media and by the start of this year the revolution was in full swing.
Sites like Youtube and file sharing technologies like Bitcomet achieved critical mass and enabled anyone who so wished to view whatever movies or TV shows they wanted without ever going near a cinema, video store or TV set.
Communications technologies like Skype and Jajah allowed phone calls around the world for free, while Weblogs and podcasts eroded the position of old media.
It was, as Murdoch correctly observed, an inflection point for mass media -- the dawn of a new age of information to be ignored at one's certain peril.
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