The Rise and Fall of Myspace

From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the most used social networking site in the entire world. In 2006 Myspace even surpassed Google as the most visited site in the United States. More recently things have been much different for Myspace with the advent of social media sites that are popular worldwide such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Nowadays, Myspace does not even come close to competing with any of these sites on the basis of market share or number of users. In 2011 Myspace was facing especially hard times and the company was forced to lay off 47 percent of its workers, which was about 500 employees. News Corp., the parent company of Myspace, has even announced an interest in selling Myspace to an outside party but received very little interest in the dying network. Myspace was finally sold in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million, a fraction of what News Corp. had originally acquired the network for. Kids my age definitely would have heard of Myspace but virtually no one uses it and kids in generations younger than me might not have even heard of Myspace at all and probably never will.

A common misconception is Facebook was the first social media platform to be invented. Myspace actually beat Facebook by a year with its creation and launch taking place on August 1, 2003. Myspace is the brainchild of three friends who were all working together at eUniverse, an internet-based marketing company. These three friends were Tom Anderson, Jon Hart and Chris DeWolf. Anderson served as the first president for Myspace and DeWolf was the first CEO of the network. All three of the original founders of Myspace were avid users of the social gaming site Friendster and saw potential in its social networking features. Within ten days of beginning the project, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch. Not long after its launch, Myspace quickly began gaining popularity among teenagers and young adults across the United States. By 2005 Myspace had become so popular that Anderson was able to sell the social networking platform for $580 million to the media giant News Corp. In 2008 Myspace reached its peak with attracting 75.9 million users to the site in one month.

Shortly after reaching its 75.9 million user peak in 2008, Myspace was surpassed by
Facebook as the most popular social media platform on April 19, 2008. Ever since this date, Myspace has seen a continuous decline in membership. A $900 million advertising deal with Google actually may have hurt Myspace more than it actually helped it. This deal required Myspace to run even more advertisements on its already heavily advertised platform. This caused the site to run much slower, increased difficulty for users and made the website much less flexible for changes. While Myspace was becoming cluttered and less user-friendly, Facebook had created a streamlined, easy-to-use social media platform that was centered around the user experience. Facebook also made it possible for outside developers to build new applications for the site and Myspace was deadest on keeping all development in house. This allowed for Facebook to make changes to the platform based on what users actually want and the site began growing at a pace Myspace could no longer keep up with. While Myspace is still around today, it's market share has dwindled away to almost nothing and has been overshadowed by social media powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter. Today Myspace’s biggest accomplishment is igniting the spark that led to the widespread social media use of today.