The Wall Street Journal (paid subscribers only) reports this morning:
Seeking to expand its Web presence, News Corp. said it is buying online entertainment company Intermix Media Inc. for about $580 million in cash.
[…]
Intermix, which is based in Los Angeles, owns more than 30 Web sites, including sites that deliver online greeting cards and games, though its social-networking site MySpace.com is the best known. The network of sites attracts more than 27 million unique monthly users, News Corp. said.
The company came under fire from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who accused Intermix of secretly installing “adware” — software that delivers pop-up advertisements or similar promotions. Last month the company reached a tentative agreement to pay $7.5 million over three years to settle the accusations.
It was stupid when Microsoft was thinking of acquiring a company that has an adware division. It is double-plus bad for the company that owns Fox and Fox News to get into the spyware business. But it’s completely in character with the Murdoch empire’s complete lack of business ethics.
Ed Bott 
I guess you do not like Fox News, but Clinton News Network ain’t that much better…why I guess the feeling I am going to get it….
If you actually read this site, you would realize that I have no love for CNN either. They’re almost (but not quite) as bad as Fox News. But why do you have to have such a knee-jerk reaction? Do you actually want to defend Murdoch’s decision to buy an ADMITTED spyware company? Do you actually want to stay on topic, or are you just a troll?
I agree with you that Murdock should not be buying a Spyware and I can’t even understand from a shareholders point of view why he would do this. Another words, does the spyware acquisition add any values to the sharholders, I think not, but…
All in all, why is he buying this company….does it have a piece of technology that Fox needs and it would be cheaper to buy it than to start from scratch? Is Fox going to use this purchase to intergrate with its new Fox Interactive Media department.
Please, I am not trolling and I do enjoy your comments
I’m with Tom Leonhard, I can’t figure out what Rupert would want with this company. This buyout is about the same amount of money Microsoft was rumored to be paying for Claria, so if it’s a dollars-per-ounce-of-evil thing I think they overpaid. 🙂
What really blows me away is that today Whirlpool bid $1.2B to buy Maytag; is an upstart spyware company worth almost half that of a venerable appliance company?
Can we just start these comments over please? 🙄
Any company willing to associate themselves with a known malware provider is effectively biting the hand that feeds it.