Myspace

• 1. Introduction

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  Myspace launched on the 1st of August, 2003, and within a few years became the most visited website in the United States, beating out Yahoo Mail and Google Search. At its peak in April 2008, it had 115 million monthly visitors and was valued at $12 billion. Then it lost nearly everything. By 2019, it was down to seven million monthly visitors, a fraction of what it once commanded. And in March 2019, a botched server migration wiped out more than 50 million songs and 12 years of user content with no backup. How does a platform that helped launch YouTube, Zynga, and Photobucket, that signed a $900 million deal with Google, that introduced Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Nicki Minaj to the world, collapse so completely? The answer involves a record-breaking acquisition, a toxic advertising deal, a safety scandal, and a social network born in a college dorm that simply outmaneuvered it at every turn.

• 2. Ten Days to Launch

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  In August 2003, a small group of eUniverse employees who had Friendster accounts gathered to talk about what they were seeing. Friendster had the right idea, they decided, but the execution was slow. Within ten days, the first version of MySpace was built, written in ColdFusion. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan, eUniverse's founder, chairman, and CEO. He managed Chris DeWolfe, who became MySpace's starting CEO, alongside Josh Berman and Tom Anderson, who served as starting president. A tech expert named Toan Nguyen helped stabilize the platform early on when Greenspan asked him to join. Co-founder and CTO Aber Whitcomb handled the software architecture, choosing ColdFusion specifically because it offered faster development than rival technologies at the time. Friendster, built on JavaServer Pages, had more than ten times the number of developers but could not keep pace. The first users were eUniverse's own employees, and the company ran internal contests to see who could recruit the most new sign-ups. eUniverse then used its existing base of 20 million users and email subscribers to seed the new platform. DeWolfe had once suggested charging a fee for basic access, but Greenspan rejected the idea, convinced that keeping MySpace free was the only way to build a real community. That instinct proved correct: the site spread fast, particularly in larger cities, where it displaced instant messaging as the default way people communicated online.

• 3. The News Corp Era

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  In July 2005, News Corporation paid $580 million to acquire MySpace, one of the company's first major internet purchases. At the time of the deal, the site had 16 million monthly users and was growing rapidly. News Corporation had outbid Viacom for the company, and within a year, the purchase had tripled in value. By January 2006, MySpace was signing up 200,000 new users every single day. A year after that, the figure had risen to 320,000 per day, and the site had overtaken Yahoo to become the most visited website in the United States. ComScore attributed the surge to high "engagement levels," noting that the average MySpace user viewed over 660 pages a month. In August 2006, the 100 millionth MySpace account was created, in the Netherlands. That same month, MySpace signed a landmark advertising deal with Google guaranteeing $900 million over three years, more than 55% above the price News Corporation had originally paid. Google received exclusive rights to provide web search results and sponsored links on the site. Google chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time that the company's internal metrics all pointed to MySpace as where users and user-generated content were heading. By October 2006, MySpace had grown from generating $1 million in revenue per month to $30 million per month, with half coming from the Google arrangement and the rest from in-house display advertising. During the 2008 fiscal year, annual revenue reached $800 million. When News Corporation briefly explored a merger with Yahoo in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion and had over 300 million registered users.

• 4. Music as Identity

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  Shortly after the News Corporation sale in 2005, Myspace launched its own record label, MySpace Records, with JD Mangosing as CEO. The label was designed to discover talent emerging from Myspace Music, a service allowing artists to upload songs, EPs, and full-length albums directly to the platform. Artists including My Chemical Romance, Nicki Minaj, Lily Allen, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry gained recognition through the site. Over eight million artists were hosted there at peak. In late 2007, the site launched The MySpace Transmissions, a series of live-in-studio recordings by well-known artists. In 2007, MySpace partnered with Sony BMG to put music directly on the platform; Sony was drawn in by the site's 110 million users and by the number of musical artists who had already made careers there. On the 18th of November 2009, MySpace Music acquired the streaming service Imeem for less than $1 million. As of June 2014, more than 53 million songs had been uploaded by 14.2 million artists over the platform's lifetime. Tim Vanderhook, who served as CEO of Myspace during the Viant ownership period, later alleged that Google had used its acquisition of YouTube to steer music deals and artists away from Myspace, and had used its search algorithm to direct users toward YouTube instead. Whether or not the allegation holds, music had become so central to Myspace's identity that its loss would prove catastrophic. The March 2019 server migration that destroyed all content from the site's first twelve years also erased over 50 million songs permanently. In April 2019, the Internet Archive recovered 490,000 MP3s through what it described as an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. Those recovered files are now known collectively as the "MySpace Dragon Hoard."

• 5. Why It Fell

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  On the 19th of April, 2008, Facebook overtook Myspace in Alexa traffic rankings. In May 2009, Facebook passed Myspace in unique U.S. visitors, and the gap widened steadily from that point. Several structural problems had been building for years. A former MySpace executive argued that the $900 million Google advertising deal, though a welcome cash windfall, had forced MySpace to load its pages with even more advertising, making the site slower and harder to use. Crucially, the deal prevented MySpace from experimenting with its own design without forfeiting revenue. CEO Chris DeWolfe later reported that he had to push back against Fox Interactive Media's sales team, who prioritized monetization over user experience. In 2012, former executive Travis Katz described how News Corporation had pressured MySpace to focus on near-term revenue rather than long-term product thinking, while Facebook concentrated on user engagement first. Safety also became a liability. In 2006, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation into children's exposure to pornography on Myspace, and the resulting media coverage gave the site a reputation it never fully escaped. MySpace also struggled with spam, phishing, malware, and vandalism. Researcher Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research observed at the time 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." By early 2011, Myspace had fallen from 95 million to 63 million unique users in just twelve months. In February 2011, traffic dropped 44% year over year to 37.7 million U.S. visitors. News Corporation put the site up for sale in late February 2011, and on the 29th of June, 2011, Specific Media and Justin Timberlake jointly acquired it for approximately $35 million. Rupert Murdoch later called the original $580 million purchase a "huge mistake."

• 6. The Developer Platform

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  On the 5th of February, 2008, Myspace opened a developer platform allowing outside programmers to build applications directly on the site. The launch was preceded by a workshop at the MySpace offices in San Francisco two weeks before the official opening. The platform was built on the OpenSocial API, which Google had introduced in November 2007 to give social networks a shared standard for widgets and applications. The first public beta of MySpace Apps went live on the 5th of March, 2008, with around 1,000 applications already available. Companies including RockYou and Slide.com had been operating on Myspace as widget providers before the formal platform existed. Other developers built layout customization tools and made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so; the source notes that most of these developers were in their late teens and early twenties. MySpace's developer platform is credited as a direct launchpad for companies such as Zynga, RockYou, and Photobucket. In November 2007, Myspace had also joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance alongside Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning, and Six Apart, whose stated goal was a common set of standards so developers could write programs that worked across social networks rather than being locked to a single platform.

• 7. Lost and Archived

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  In March 2019, Myspace lost all content uploaded before 2016 during a faulty server migration. The site offered no backup. Photos, videos, blogs, and music spanning from the platform's 2003 founding through 2015 were gone. In June 2013, even before the migration disaster, a site redesign had already deleted all previous user blogs, destroying records that would later have been treated as historical documents. A separate data exposure had surfaced in May 2016, when information on almost 360 million Myspace accounts appeared on a dark web marketplace called TheRealDeal. The exposed data included email addresses, usernames, and weakly encrypted passwords stored as SHA1 hashes of the first ten characters of each password, converted to lowercase and stored without a cryptographic salt. Analysis of the data suggested it had been exposed around mid-2008 to early 2009, roughly eight years before it became public. As of the 5th of October, 2024, Myspace was placed in read-only mode, with no new articles published since early 2022, most images broken, and existing songs unable to play. The privacy policy was last revised on the 24th of June, 2024. The 490,000 MP3s recovered by the Internet Archive from the 2008-2010 window remain the largest surviving fragment of what was once the internet's most important music platform.