MSN, MySpace China to cooperate

When China Web2.0 Review announced a merger between MySpace China and MSN China, denials appeared very fast. Now, a new partnership between both companies has been announced, not a merger, but interesting enough.

MSN China takes outsourcing strategy to build its Chinese portal, it cooperates with dozens of partners to provide various content and services to its users. Content and service providers have to pay for several millions Yuan a year to be a partner. However, because of MSN’s heavy traffic and extensive user base among Chinese white collar, they still regard MSN China as an effective way to quickly expand their user base.

MySpace, MSN Spaces merge in China

The China Web2.0 review reports on a merger between slugging MySpace and MSN Live Spaces. The current MySpace CEO Luo Chuan, former CEO of MSN Live Spaces in China, will be heading the merged business.
The move comes after early reports about the lackluster start of Rupert Murdoch's MySpace in China. The first comments are carefully positive:

What we can expect from this merge? At least, the merge shows that Myspace China is almost entirely autonomous from Myspace to make its own strategy, which is a good start to compete in Chinese market.

One of the problems Yahoo and other US-based internet companies had was that they were too dependent on their US bosses and could not develop according to the requirements of the China market.

Update: The story has been denied later today by Luo Chuan. See the comment.