2003–2005: Beginnings and rise , before 2016, where Myspace was also housed (now home to
Fandango) In August 2003, several
eUniverse employees with
Friendster accounts saw potential in its social networking features. The group decided to mimic the more popular features of the website. Within 10 days, the first version of MySpace was ready for launch, implemented using
ColdFusion. A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise,
bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site. The project was overseen by
Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's founder, chairman and CEO), who managed
Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman,
Tom Anderson (MySpace's starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse. It was during this early period in June 2003, just prior to the birth of MySpace, that
Jeffrey Edell was brought on as chairman of parent company Intermix Media. The first MySpace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to breathe life into MySpace and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen, who helped stabilize the platform when Greenspan asked him to join the team. Co-founder and CTO
Aber Whitcomb played an integral role in software architecture, utilizing the then-superior development speed of ColdFusion over other dynamic database driven server-side languages of the time. Despite having over ten times the number of developers,
Friendster, which was developed in
JavaServer Pages (jsp), could not keep up with the speed of development of MySpace and
cfm. For example, users could customize the background, look and feel of pages on MySpace. MySpace originally gained users because of how easy it made communication with other users. Before MySpace debuted, many people communicated online through instant messaging or IM. However, MySpace got so popular that people started to use MySpace to message people even more than IM. This was especially true in bigger cities that had more people compared to suburbs that still used IM more. The MySpace.com domain was originally owned by YourZ.com, Inc., intended until 2002 for use as an online data storage and sharing site. By late 2003, it was transitioned from a file storage service to a social networking site. A friend who also worked in the data storage business reminded DeWolfe that he had earlier bought the MySpace.com domain. DeWolfe suggested they charge a fee for the basic MySpace service. However, Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping the site free was necessary to make it a successful community. MySpace quickly gained popularity among teenagers and young adults. In February 2005, DeWolfe held talks with
Mark Zuckerberg over acquiring
Facebook, but rejected Zuckerberg's offer to sell Facebook to him for $75 million. Some employees of MySpace, including DeWolfe and Berman, were able to purchase
equity in the property before MySpace and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed
Intermix Media) were bought.
2005–2009: Purchase by News Corp. and peak years In July 2005, in one of the company's first major Internet purchases,
News Corporation purchased MySpace for US$580 million. At the time of the acquisition, the company was seeing 16 million monthly users and was growing exponentially. News Corporation had beat out
Viacom by offering a higher price for the website, and the purchase was seen as a good investment at the time. In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of MySpace. During 2006, MySpace launched localized versions in 11 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, including MySpace China with Solstice. At the time,
Travis Katz, senior vice-president for international operations, reported that 30 million of the site's 90 million users were coming from outside of the United States. That same month, MySpace signed a landmark advertising deal with
Google that guaranteed MySpace $900 million over three years, over 55% more than the price News Corporation had paid to acquire the business. In exchange, Google received exclusive rights to provide Web search results and sponsored links on MySpace. When the deal was signed, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said, "When we looked at what was growing on the Web, all our internal metrics pointed to [MySpace] [...] It's important to move Google to where users are, and that is where user-generated content is." By October 2006, MySpace had grown from generating $1 million in revenue per month to $30 million per month, half of which came from the Google deal. The remaining 50% came from display advertising sold by MySpace's in-house sales team. In mid-2007, MySpace was the largest social-networking site in every European country where it had created a local presence. By July 2007, Nielsen//NetRatings reported the company's "active reach", or the percentage of the population that visited the site, was anywhere from 10 to 15 times higher in Spain, France and Germany than for runner-up Facebook; in the United Kingdom, MySpace led Facebook by two-to-one in terms of reach. MySpace would even land deals with major corporations like Sony. In 2007 MySpace partnered with Sony BMG, a Sony record label, to put music directly on the MySpace platform. Sony became interested in MySpace as they had 110 million users and had a lot of musical artists make their start on the platform. On November 1, 2007, MySpace and
Bebo joined the Google-led
OpenSocial alliance, which already included Friendster,
Hi5,
LinkedIn,
Plaxo,
Ning, and
Six Apart. The alliance's goal was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site
Orkut in the American market, and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook. By late 2007 and into 2008, MySpace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out its main competitor Facebook in traffic. Initially, the emergence of Facebook did little to diminish MySpace's popularity; at the time, Facebook was targeted only at college students. At its peak, when News Corporation attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion and had more than 300 million registered users.
2009–2016: Decline and sale by News Corporation On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in
Alexa rankings. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the number of unique U.S. visitors. A former MySpace executive suggested that the $900 million three-year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall, was a handicap in the long run, as it required MySpace to place even more ads on its already heavily advertised space, which made the site slow, more difficult to use and less flexible. MySpace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while Facebook was rolling out a new, clean site design. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reported that he had to fight Fox Interactive Media's sales team, who
monetized the site without regard to user experience.
Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at
Microsoft Research, noted of social networking websites that "companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear, as influential peers pull others in on the climb up—and signal to flee when it's time to get out." The volatility of social networks was exemplified in 2006, when Connecticut Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation into children's exposure to pornography on MySpace. The resulting media frenzy and the site's lack of an effective spam filter gave the site a reputation as a "vortex of perversion". Around that time, specialized social media companies such as Twitter formed and began targeting users on MySpace, while Facebook rolled out communication tools that were seen as safe in comparison to MySpace. In addition, MySpace had particular problems with vandalism, phishing, malware, and spam, which it failed to curtail, making the site inhospitable. These have been cited as factors why users, who as teenagers were MySpace's strongest audience in 2006 and 2007, had been migrating to Facebook, which started strongly with the 18-to-24 group (mostly college students) and has been much more successful than MySpace at attracting older users. News Corporation chairman and CEO
Rupert Murdoch was said to be frustrated that MySpace never met expectations as a distribution outlet for Fox studio content and missed the US$1 billion mark in total revenues. This resulted in DeWolfe and Anderson gradually losing their status within Murdoch's inner circle of executives, as well as DeWolfe's mentor
Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corporation, departing the company in June 2009. Former
AOL executive Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corporation in charge of the digital media business, was in the job for three weeks when he shuffled MySpace's executive team in April 2009. MySpace president Tom Anderson stepped down while Chris DeWolfe was replaced as CEO by former Facebook COO
Owen Van Natta. A meeting at News Corporation over the direction of MySpace in March 2009 was reportedly the catalyst for that management shakeup, with the Google search deal about to expire and the departure of key personnel (Myspace's COO, SVP of engineering, and SVP of strategy) to form a startup. Furthermore, the opening of extravagant new offices around the world was questioned, as Facebook did not have similarly expensive expansion plans but still attracted international users at a rapid rate. According to Tim Vanderhook, the CEO of MySpace when it was owned by Viant, MySpace was killed by a "calculated takedown by Google over music". Vanderhook alleges that Google used their recent acquisition of YouTube to take away a lot of the music deals they otherwise would have gotten by getting artists to put music on YouTube instead of MySpace. This utterly crippled MySpace as they had come to rely on the content of musical artists. Vanderhook also alleges that Google used their search engine algorithm to steer users away from MySpace and towards YouTube. In 2009, MySpace implemented site redesigns as a way to get users back. However, this may have backfired, as users generally disliked tweaks and changes on Facebook. In March 2011, market research figures released by
Comscore suggested that Myspace had lost 10 million users between January and February 2011, and had fallen from 95 million to 63 million unique users in the previous 12 months. Myspace registered its sharpest audience declines in February 2011, as traffic fell 44% from a year earlier to 37.7 million U.S. visitors. Advertisers were reported as unwilling to commit to long-term deals with the site. In late February 2011, News Corporation officially put the site up for sale for an estimated $50–200 million. Losses from the last quarter of 2010 were $156 million, over double the previous year, which dragged down the otherwise strong results of News Corporation. The deadline for bids, May 31, 2011, passed without any above the reserve price of $100 million being submitted. It has been said that the decline in users during the most recent quarter deterred several potential suitors.
CNN reported that the site sold for $35 million, and noted that it was "far less than the $580 million News Corp. paid for Myspace in 2005." Murdoch went on to call the Myspace purchase a "huge mistake", and
Time magazine compared it to
Time Warner's 2000 purchase of
AOL, which saw a conglomerate trying to stay ahead of the competition.
2016–2019: Time Inc. and Meredith Corporation ownership On February 11, 2016, it was announced that Myspace and its parent company had been bought by
Time Inc. selling its equity in
Viant, the parent company of Specific Media, back to Viant Technology Holding Inc. In May 2016, the data for almost 360 million Myspace accounts was offered on
TheRealDeal dark market website, which included email addresses, usernames, and weakly encrypted passwords (
SHA1 hashes of the first 10 characters of the password converted to lowercase and stored without a cryptographic
salt). The exact
data breach date is unknown, but analysis of the data suggests it was exposed around eight years before being made public, around mid-2008 to early 2009.
Since 2019: Viant Technology Holding Inc. ownership In March 2019, Myspace lost all content before 2016 after a faulty server migration. The terms of service of Myspace have not been changed by Viant. The privacy policy was last revised on June 24, 2024. As of October 5, 2024, Myspace was placed in a read-only mode of sorts, and no new articles have been published since early 2022. Most images on the site are broken, and existing songs also could not be played. ==Features==