Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- MySpace, the world's largest social- networking Web site, plans to be operating in 30 countries in the next year and may get more than half of its sales outside the U.S. by 2012, Chief Executive Officer Chris DeWolfe said.

The company, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., will double its workforce to 1,600 in the next year as it adds features and expands, DeWolfe said yesterday in an interview. MySpace, in 23 countries now, also plans two to three acquisitions a year, he said.

``If you look at any Internet site, the majority of their profits are from their global business,'' said DeWolfe, who helped start MySpace as a five-person operation four years ago. ``We'll run out of people in the U.S. Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world.''

MySpace, confronting competition from Facebook, plans to attract new visitors and advertisers by letting outside software developers add features to the Web sites. MySpace is worth at least $16.2 billion, or 30 times the $580 million New York-based News Corp. paid for it in 2005, Murdoch said this week.

News Corp. Class A shares, down 1.2 percent this year, fell 84 cents, or 3.8 percent, to $21.22 at 4:03 p.m. in New York time in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

Expanding Los Angeles-based MySpace outside the U.S. will help News Corp. tap potential ad revenue growth overseas, said David Bank, an RBC Capital Markets analyst in New York. MySpace generates 90 cents in ad sales for each international user, a fraction of the $8.57 per subscriber in the U.S., he estimated.

Cutting Edge

``It's a question of how quickly they can scale,'' said Bank, who has an ``outperform'' rating on News Corp. shares and doesn't own any. ``They probably need to maintain the perception of hipness and the most cutting-edge platform.''

MySpace, which already has Web sites in Australia, China and the U.K., plans to start them soon in Russia, Poland and South Korea, DeWolfe said.

The company is hiring engineers in the U.S. and overseas to develop features that will draw users to the Web sites for longer periods of time, DeWolfe said. MySpace wants improvements that let users customize what information different groups of people see, he said.

Facebook Competition

MySpace's U.S. viewers declined sequentially for the first time in the company's history during the quarter ended Sept.30, Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang in an Oct. 18 note, citing data from researcher ComScore Inc. MySpace's visitors fell to 68.4 million in September from 70.5 million in June, Wang said.

``Continued declines may signal cannibalization from Facebook, which would be a more serious issue than simply maturation,'' said New York-based Wang, who has a ``peer perform'' rating on News Corp. and doesn't own any.

ComScore couldn't be reached for comment on the data.

Closely held Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, said Oct. 17 it will more than double employees to 700 in the next year to develop new features and sell more ads.

The two companies are fighting over the social-networking advertising market in the U.S., which is forecast to more than double to $900 million this year, according to New York researcher EMarketer Inc. Growth will outpace the overall online ad market every year through 2011, when ads on social-networking sites will reach $2.5 billion, EMarketer estimates.

MySpace offers advertisers different ways to target users. They can sponsor ``secret shows'' or online concerts and find users based on hobbies and ages. In the next 45 days MySpace will introduce a ``self-serve'' option that lets businesses publicize services to users within a certain area, DeWolfe said.

The site's revenue may more than triple to $2.97 billion in fiscal 2013 from an estimated $849 million in the year ending June 30, 2008, Bank said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gillian Wee in New York at gwee3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 19, 2007 16:14 EDT