Matthew Garrahan, FT: News Corporation is paying more than $1m a month to rent an empty office complex in Los Angeles that it has been unable to sub-lease since scrapping an ambitious plan to move MySpace and its other digital businesses there.

The company is locked into a 12-year lease worth about $350m that it signed in August 2008, when the number of people using MySpace was increasing and the social network was running out of space in its Beverly Hills offices.

The deal commits News Corp to 420,000 sq ft of space in Playa Vista, near Los Angeles International airport. When it was signed Peter Levinsohn, the former president of News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media unit, used a memo to staff to hail the deal as “the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years”.

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Ah well. Seemed like a good idea at the time.



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See Also:

• MySpace Misses Google Guarantees, Costs The Company $100 Million (NWS)
• MySpace's New Strategy Won't Work, Either
• A Glance At Internet History Suggests MySpace Is Pretty Much Worthless (NWS)

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