MySpace founder Tom Anderson has discovered that even having 200 million friends and Rupert Murdoch as a boss won't help when your website is no longer flavor of the month. Anderson admits it was a wake-up call when the huge organic growth of the site he co-founded with his friend Chris DeWolfe in August 2003 and sold to News Corp. two years later suddenly came under pressure. "We felt like we'd peaked," he said. "We weren't tailing off, but our growth was slowing down. Everyone who was going to get on MySpace got on it long ago. We've been …

While news organizations continue to worry about what Google is doing to their business, the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas. Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals. Several online news experts say Google News has changed little, especially when compared with services like Google Maps and Gmail, which add new features at a rapid pace. While it is clearly past the experimental stage, Google News still shows no ads, and there are no signs …

Google execs, the conventional wisdom goes, leave because they're super rich and need a new challenge. Yahoo execs (many of whom got rich earlier, during happier days) leave because things are going badly. Again, this could be turned into a plus if Yahoo gets an infusion of new talent and energy. Since Yahoo is trading back near multi-year lows, you have executives sitting on piles of underwater stock options, which may not see air for quite some time, if ever. As much as Yahoo might like to retain these execs, companies are hesitant to do anything that smacks of …

J.C. Penney Co. execs are blaming the company's ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, for a fake ad that debuted at Cannes and is now on YouTube in which the retailer appears to be endorsing teen sex. The purported ad shows two teenagers in their own bedrooms stripping down to their underwear and then timing themselves as they race to put on their clothes. All this is done in preparation for the boy and girl to hang out in her basement while her mother is upstairs. The video, called "Speed Dressing," ends with the teens heading down to the basement as …

The feeling persists that Microsoft is still hovering in the wings with some fabulously clever ploy to grab Yahoo once the time is right, once Yahoo's current bumbling management is swept aside, once Yahoo's stock once again falls below the $20 per share mark that prompted its last foray. Yesterday, it was some apparently mistranslated words from a German story coming from Microsoft's Kevin Johnson-the head of its Platforms & Services unit who has been one of the main execs driving the Yahoo bid-about the company ready to make a new one if management changes. This kind of thing has …

According to a new report from eMarketer, Apple's iPod is partly to blame for the collapse of the music industry, having set the tone for a "rats nest of restrictions and incompatibilities" that put the stop on music's growth. Paul Verna, the report's author, says that end-user confusion played a major role, as music fans were forced to sort out an explosion of confusing and incompatible formats, players, restrictions and retailers. Thus, Apple's iPod has been a "double-edged sword" for the industry, having contributed greatly to the splintering of the music biz with its closed ecosystem, Verna claims. Meanwhile, …

The Google-Microsoft arms race is making advertising agency executives nervous, The New York Times says in a report from the Cannes international advertising festival. They worry that Google's recent search pact with Yahoo will only strengthen the Web giant's dominance of online advertising, and that Microsoft will continue to use its inexhaustible cash horde to keep up. Meanwhile, both companies are extending their reach into traditional advertising, which has long been the large agencies' bread and butter. Google "clearly wants to replace the advertising industry in its totality," said Cindy Gallop, a former chief executive of the ad agency …

TechCrunch has put together a model that attempts to value social networks by looking at social media usage in each country and attaching a value to it based on how much money is spent on online advertising per person. Of course, ultimately, the market has the final say on asset valuations, but the TechCrunch model results are surprising, nonetheless. In terms of worldwide users, Facebook recently overtook MySpace as the Web's No.1 social network. The rest, in descending order, are Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo. However, when you take into account where users live and how much money is …