LOS ANGELES -- A founder of MySpace who objected to the popular site's $580 million sale to News Corp. has trained his sights on China.

Brad Greenspan said Wednesday that he founded BroadWebAsia, which has in turn taken stakes in 20 Chinese Internet companies that focus on entertainment and - like MySpace - social networking.

Greenspan founded eUniverse in 1999, which housed dozens of Internet sites including MySpace.

Greenspan said that, once noticing the success that Friendster was having as a pioneer of online social networking, he and his staff set about to create a competitor.

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At first, eUniverse employees were the only users of MySpace. He credited the promotional power of the eUniverse sites, in particular its dating sites, for allowing MySpace to quickly overrun Friendster in terms of popularity.

EUniverse changed its name to Intermix and News Corp. purchased it last year over objections from Greenspan, who no longer was an executive at the company but still its largest shareholder. Greenspan said that revenue was skyrocketing at MySpace and that the price tag was too low. News Corp. has since bragged that a recent $900 million deal between MySpace and Google already has made the acquisition worth the cost.

With BroadWebAsia, Greenspan said he hopes to replicate the success he had with MySpace.

He said each of his investments so far have ranged from $200,000-$3 million and all have been financed through BroadWebAsia, which employs 15 people in offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai.

He said he intends to raise $50 million through private equity or the public markets in either the U.K. or China. He also intends to invest in Asian companies outside of China.

Greenspan said he has focused on investing in already-established Chinese companies in order to navigate the difficult regulatory environment in China that includes censorship of online content.

"We're working with Chinese entities who have already thought out those issues rather than just trying to create a MySpace 2.0," he said.

According to some estimates, about 120 million people in China have Internet access, though that's only about 10% of the population, so the growth potential is phenomenal.

Greenspan said traffic at the 20 portfolio companies that make up BroadWebAsia is about 20 million unique visitors per day.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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