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.