MUSIC STAR JUSTIN Timberlake has teamed up with a US advertising firm to buy MySpace for just 6 per cent of the amount it cost Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp when it bought the now floundering social network in 2005.

The star of the Facebook inspired movie The Social Network will take a stake in one of its rivals and shape its strategy alongside the US advertising agency Specific Media, the Telegraph reports.

Timberlake played the Napster founder Sean Parker in the hit movie The Social Network which told the story of the founding of Facebook, the social network which has enjoyed extraordinary success to the detriment of MySpace, a site originally founded for users to share their musical interests.

The $35 million (€24m) deal is a small fraction of the $580 million that Murdoch’s News Corporation paid for MySpace in 2005 when it was the dominant force in social networking after it was founded in 2003.

Only three years it was still the world’s biggest social networking site but since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, the site has been in decline and is predicted to go out of existence by 2012.

NewsCorp wanted $100 million for the company, but had to settle for significantly less, the Guardian reports.

The deal is expected to see MySpace shed more than half of its 500 jobs. This follows a 30 per cent cut of staff in April 2010 and a further cut of nearly 50 per cent in January of this year. Two years ago, the company employed 1,400 people.

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