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Facetime May 21, 2008, 10:06PM EST

Facetime with Chris DeWolfe

(page 2 of 2)

Last week, prosecutors in L.A. indicted a woman who used a phony MySpace persona allegedly to harass a 13-year-old who later committed suicide. What are you doing to protect against such incidents? How easy is it for people to get through the barriers, and how do you protect against sexual predators on the site?

That is something we've been hyper-focused on since Day One. We literally review every single image that gets uploaded to the site on a daily basis. That's 17 million images a day that get viewed by a human pair of eyes. So our customer support investment has just been massive. But there's always going to be a few bad actors everywhere.

Also last week, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against so-called spam king Sanford Wallace for allegedly creating phony MySpace accounts and hijacking existing accounts to send out hundreds of thousands of spam messages. A blog posting on sanfordwallace.com says the Wallace organization was once hired by MySpace to promote it through unsolicited mail. It also alleges that eUniverse, which started MySpace, was a major spammer. Your response?

I'm not going to talk about this on the record, but I'm telling you, everything is just completely fabricated and untrue.

How have things changed since Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace?

At the time that News Corp. bought us, we had somewhere around 22 million unique users. Now I think we're close to 120 million unique users worldwide. Our site has also become less of a niche site, where in the early days it was the creative trendsetters that were really driving the growth—from musicians to artists to actors to comedians. Now it's everybody. So the demographic has widened a great deal. Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S., believe it or not, are on MySpace. Twelve percent of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace. Forty-five percent of all the users on MySpace are over the age of 35.

I guess the mothers want to see what their kids are doing.

For the most part, they're using the site for the same reason everyone else is: to socialize. If you look at the Internet generation, where it went mainstream was around 1995. So if you were 25 years old in 1995, you're now 38, which would be right in the sweet spot of where a mother would be.

How do you see all this developing from here?

Certainly we see more and more collaboration, and we see the Web becoming more mashed up, where MySpace could live on eBay (EBAY), MySpace could live on Yahoo! (YHOO). You know thousands of engineers are developing amazing features for MySpace to make it more rich and interesting.

Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell .

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