News Corp is on course to sell its social networking unit MySpace by mid-2011, business news network CNBC reported on Monday.

The company will also lay off more than half of its staff the news network said, citing sources.

A MySpace spokeswoman declined to comment.

Reuters reported in November that News Corp was open to a sale of MySpace after its relaunch as an entertainment site [nN29231678]. A successful revamp of the site -- still visited by around 60 million people a month -- was seen as possibly paving the way for a sale.

MySpace, once one of the fastest growing sites on the Web, has fallen behind its much larger rival Facebook which is visited by about 150 million people monthly.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

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