Short answers, pulled from the story.
Myspace launched on the 1st of August, 2003. It was created by a team at eUniverse overseen by founder Brad Greenspan, with Chris DeWolfe as starting CEO, Tom Anderson as starting president, Josh Berman, and CTO Aber Whitcomb. The first version was built in ten days using ColdFusion.
News Corporation paid $580 million for Myspace in July 2005. Within a year the purchase had tripled in value, and at its peak in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion. News Corporation later sold it for approximately $35 million in June 2011.
In March 2019, a faulty server migration destroyed all Myspace content uploaded before 2016, including over 50 million songs, with no backup. The Internet Archive later recovered 490,000 MP3s from an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010; these files are known as the "MySpace Dragon Hoard."
Artists including My Chemical Romance, Nicki Minaj, Lily Allen, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry gained fame and recognition through Myspace. At its peak, the platform hosted over eight million artists and had over 53 million songs uploaded by 14.2 million artists.
Several factors contributed. The $900 million Google advertising deal forced Myspace to overload its pages with ads, making the site slow and inflexible while Facebook rolled out a cleaner design. News Corporation pressured the company to prioritize short-term revenue over product development. Safety scandals, spam, and phishing also damaged the site's reputation, accelerating a user migration to Facebook.
Myspace's developer platform and ecosystem helped launch companies including Zynga, RockYou, and Photobucket. The platform was formally opened on the 5th of February, 2008, built on the OpenSocial API, and had around 1,000 applications available at its first public beta launch on the 5th of March, 2008.