MySpace sale close at hand

According to news agency Reuters, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is selling a controlling stake in the once-popular social networking site MySpace—and a group of investors are close to buying.

The report said the group most likely to close the deal included Bobby Kotick, CEO of Blizzard—the company responsible for the hugely successful online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

It was thought NewsCorp would be unlikely to achieve its asking price.

"News Corp, which paid $580 million for Myspace in 2005, had hoped to do a deal valuing Myspace at about $100 million, but sources said it was unlikely to achieve that target."

NewsCorp bought MySpace in July 2005, a matter of months before Facebook started gaining critical mass. According to Google user data, MySpace currently has around 60m users worldwide; Facebook has 890m.