News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said Monday a joint venture with Japan’s Softbank Corp. to bring the popular Internet social-networking site MySpace to Japan was “a possibility,” BusinessWeek.com reports.
The media tycoon added that while he planned to meet Softbank President Masayoshi Son and hoped to work with him in the media business, he wouldn’t do so on an exclusive basis.
The Nihon Keizai reported earlier Monday that News Corp. and Japanese Internet services company Softbank would announce the launch of a Japanese MySpace service as early as this week.
The two companies will each provide half of the approximately 1 billion yen ($8.48 million) investment to form MySpace Japan, which will operate the new site, the report said, without identifying its sources.
The new venture comes amid rapid growth in Japan’s social networking sites, which are thought to have more than 10 million users, the Nihon Keizai said.
