News Corps is going to sell MySpace to Specific Media for $35 million, which is about $545 million less than they paid for it six years ago.

Cliff Notes Version, Not Without Biased Commentary: A shitty social website that is exponentially lamer now then when it started is going to “revitalize and transform” itself, care of an online ad company and…wait for it…Justin Timberlake. I’m not making this up:

Timberlake will have an office at MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters and a staff of about a half dozen people working for him “around the clock” developing his ideas for the site, said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook.

I can’t wait. The interesting part is at the end:

At $35 million, Specific Media gets an Internet property for a price that Altimeter’s Li called “ridiculously low” and values each monthly U.S. visitor at about $1 each. Its new owners should be able to recoup their investment if the company gets each user to click on about 20 ads over their lifetime, she said.

Nothing earth-shattering about making money off of ads, but if getting ad clicks is really what it is all about, I wouldn’t have a lot of faith in the “revitalize and transform” part. And using anyone’s lifetime has a measure of ROI, especially for something like a social media site, is probably not very wise.

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that MySpace will continue to suck.