My co-worker Basem Nayfeh made an interesting observation on YouTube versus MySpace recently – he said that he sees the YouTube acquisition as much more justifiable than MySpace for one simple reason: YouTube is a clear distruptive threat to an industry that already represents billions of dollars.
His argument that is it’ll be relatively straightforward to put together the licensing deals (being the "pipes" in the content-versus-pipes dualism) and then start tapping into the 10s of billions of dollars that represent TV. By having a close analogy in place, they can go to ad agencies and pitch something they somewhat know and understand, rather than being a purely evangelistic sale.
On the other side, MySpace is not a clear replacement for something that clearly generates revenue today. Is it just communication? If so, isn’t it just disruptive of IM, e-mail, newsgroups, etc., all things that people never figured out how to monetize? If anything, you’d expect that it might be an indirect disruption towards ALL other internet sites. Because it’s a foundation for peoples’ Internet experiences (go to MySpace first, then figure out where to go), then one could package things like video, applications, retail, and other apps that are more closely tied to monetization.