After originally partnering with News Corp to launch Myspace Japan back in 2006, Softbank is now giving up on that joint venture says Reuters, quoting a Nikkei report.
While Myspace was once one of the world’s first and most popular social networking websites, it has since fallen behind newcomers like Facebook to become the butt of more than a few internet jokes about its failure.
It was sold to a group that included Justin Timberlake for $35 million back in June. Now with the closing of its Japan office, Myspace in the US will take over the operations of its Japanese site effective February 1, 2012.
Personally I’ve not used the Myspace Japan site, and in fact, I’ve only ever found myself on Myspace’s English site once or twice. But I’m curious to know how effective its mobile strategy was in Japan (apparently they did have one [1]), and whether that may have played a role in its performance to date. According to Google, traffic to Myspace in Japan has been dropping pretty steadily as you can see below.
[Graph: Google Ad Planner]