The Rise and Fall of Social Media Empires: MySpace Podcast Transcript

What happened to Myspace and does it have a role to play in the existing social media landscape. Myspace was the most popular social media network from 2005 until 2008 and in 2006 Myspace surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. Where did it go wrong? We explore a number of possibilities and as we think back to what made Myspace great in the first place, and consider whether it could be well placed for a comeback.

Taryn Ward,  Hi, I'm Taryn Ward, and this is Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines. 

TW.   We're taking a closer look at the core issues around social media, including the rise and fall of social media empires, to better understand the role social media plays in our everyday lives in society.

TW.   Today, we'll take a look back at MySpace. 

TW.   We'll start with the question, whatever happened to MySpace, and does it have a place in the current social media landscape?  Before we dive in, it's important to know that we'll be talking about some sensitive issues today.  This episode may not be suitable for young people under the age of 18 and for anyone who is particularly sensitive to discussions about loss, death, or suicide. 

TW.   First, for those who don't know or don't remember, a quick look back at what MySpace was: MySpace was a social media platform that allowed users to create web profile pages that highlighted their interests while connecting with other members.  Users typically didn't use their real names, although they could include their real names somewhere in their screen name, and in addition to connecting with friends, members could follow official accounts.  Often, musicians publish blog posts and engage in other various ways.  Early and fairly consistently, there was a focus on promoting musicians.  There is even a dedicated section for this.  And it was possible to add a music background to your personal MySpace page without much fuss.  This is something that even I could manage.  Eventually, there were also classified ads and a video section. 

TW.   At the time, a lot of us used MySpace as sort of an in-between, with Facebook on the one hand and a personal website on the other.  It was a lot more personalised than a Facebook page would be because you could change the music, the background and, how things were organised, the font, all of that, but it didn't require the know-how or the commitment that a personal website would you didn't have to buy anything, you didn't have to code it, you don't have to pay someone else to code it for you.  And for people who may have missed some of the more personalised and creative components of AOL Instant Messenger, Myspace really felt like a place that allowed that certainly more so than Facebook did at the time, or does now really, without requiring all of the effort, again, that it would take to actually make your own website. 

TW.   I can remember spending a fairly significant amount of time myself, thinking about how my page might look and how to improve it.  And how all of that would represent me and which parts of myself I wanted represented.  What did I want someone to know about me at first glance?  What did I want someone to know about me if they were dealing a little bit deeper?  How much was too much to share?  How much was too little?  And I would say that, in some ways, this was a really important opportunity to think more deeply about which parts of our lives we were sharing and which we were keeping private during a time when things were changing very quickly.  And there were not that many opportunities to do this.  I would say, actually, it would be great if we had more opportunities to do this now because I think, you know, early on, this was all still sort of unique and different.  And we were all a little bit cautious or at least had had the opportunity to be and now a lot of these things are taken for granted. 

TW.   A little more on the background of MySpace.  If you didn't know, it was the most popular social media network from 2005 to 2008.  MySpace is free, and their revenue came from advertisements.  Originally, it was created in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe.  This came out of a project DeWolfe did as part of his MBA, and later on, he would say that he drew inspiration was from six degrees in match.com. 

TW.   By June of 2004, Myspace had hit 1 million unique visitors per month, and in 2005, it was purchased by Murdoch's News Corp for $580 million.  This turned out to be a good bet in some ways because in 2006, Myspace surpassed Google, and Yahoo is the most visited website in the United States.  There were some early concerns, especially about young people on the platform.  There were worries that young people were being exposed to sexual predators in a lot of concerns around cyberbullying. 

TW.   I said earlier on in the episode that we were going to be talking about some difficult things.  This is where you may want to hit pause or ask young people to leave the room.  The most prominent cyberbullying case at the time was a 13-year-old girl from Missouri who committed suicide after being cyber-bullied by a 49-year-old who registered herself as a 16-year-old boy.  This was really shocking at the time, at least in the United States.  It made headlines.  People were really talking about this.  And I think it was one of the first times that there really was a larger conversation about what the impacts of these networks we're having really, really widely.  If we think about similar cases now and how the public responds.  The Molly Russell case here in the United Kingdom comes to mind And specifically, the disparity really is incredible.  Maybe because in the MySpace case, they could pinpoint a clear person at fault in the platform was secondary because they allowed it to happen.  While on some of the more recent cases, it is the platforms themselves who are causing the harm, it's harder to hold them accountable legally.  Or maybe because we've become so accustomed to this, we see it as the price of doing business.  In this case, the business of connecting online, but I think it's largely in the way these cases are framed by the platform's themselves.  After its peak, Myspace hit something of a slump, and it happened hard and fast. 

TW.   Why?  Lots of competition from Facebook.  You may remember that MySpace once considered buying Facebook but that the 75 million asking price was too high.  After a huge amount of success in 2006, by the June of 2008, just one year after their valuation at $12 billion.  Facebook overtook MySpace by the number of unique worldwide visitors.  MySpace was still generating a lot of money.  In fact, in 2008, their fiscal year, they generated $800 million and continue to employ over 1600 employees.  But users began to steadily decline and attempts to rebrand were not successful.  By June of 2008, just one year after, they were valued at $12 billion.  Facebook overtook MySpace in number of unique worldwide visitors.  This was an early warning sign that things were about to go badly.  Now, MySpace was still generating revenue, in the fiscal year of 2008 alone, $800 million.  They continue to employ a lot of employees.  In fact, in 2009, there were still 1600.  MySpace was still generating revenue.  In fact, in the fiscal year of 2008 alone, over $800 million, but users were starting to decline, and they would never really turn this around.  In 2009, there was an attempt to rebrand into primarily a music site and to restructure.  In some ways, this made sense.  If you look at how MySpace started, in others, it really narrowed things in a way that was problematic.

TW.  Chris DeWolfe, who had been acting CEO, was replaced with Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, Owen Van Nata.  Exact numbers vary, but somewhere between 307 and 700 redundancies soon followed.  And there are a number of drastic website redesigns that proved to be wildly unpopular.  I remember this vaguely; it was a long time ago now.  But I remember that although I wasn't a daily user of MySpace, or maybe because I wasn't a daily user of MySpace.  I found the changes really disorienting things that had seemed simple to do and to navigate, one day, all of a sudden, you couldn't find the button or couldn't figure out how to make something work.  And, you know, for people who were regular users, maybe these were genuine improvements.  But for people who only use the platform once in a while, it was frustrating to have to learn how to use it again virtually every time you signed in. 

TW.  In 2007.  News Corp sold MySpace to Specific Media, which later became Viant, and Justin Timberlake for $35 million.  There was a lot of hope around this purchase and Timberlake's involvement in particular; there was a lot of hope and optimism that this would mean a turnaround, but it never quite came together.  In 2016, Time bought Viant, Meredith Corporation bought Time and 2018 and spun out Viant and its holdings, including MySpace, in 2019.

TW.  Aside from all this changing hands and leadership, there have been a number of security concerns late data, including email addresses, usernames and weekly encrypted passwords for nearly 360 million accounts.  This happened in May of 2016.  And then, in July that same year, a researcher revealed that old MySpace accounts can be easily accessed just by knowing a few basic pieces of personal information, and this information was often freely available on other social networks.  Note this is why, although it's nice to get those messages on your birthday, having your birthday publicly available on Facebook maybe isn't always the best idea. 

TW.  But which of these things actually caused MySpace to fail?  It's difficult to say, but one commentator has argued that it was targeting a niche audience of music and entertainment lovers, not just in those early days, but then again from 2009 Because it really limited the number of users.  There are other potential considerations, including a deal with Google in 2006 for $900 million.  Although this was a great source of revenue, it meant that Google had exclusive rights to MySpace search results and sponsored links.  One way people often think and talk about this is to contrast MySpace has declined with Facebook's rise because both platforms were launched at roughly the same time and appealed, At least initially, to similar age demographics. Comparing and contrasting at least makes some sense.  And it's worth considering this perspective.  Facebook initially focused on university students and high school students.  But they expanded and found a way to appeal or welcome a much wider variety of users.  Several commentators have noted further that Facebook was just more willing to grow and reshape with its audience, while MySpace really didn't or couldn't.  Another component to consider is it in the early days, there was still no advertisements on Facebook, and MySpace was covered in adverts, including some that have been fairly described as dodgy-looking.  MySpace actually still exists.  But with a drastically reduced market share in position. 

TW.   The question remains: What place does it have in the current social media landscape?  Partially, the answer depends on why you believe MySpace declined in the first place.  But I would argue that even setting this aside more than whether MySpace itself has a place in the current social media landscape.  The question is whether some of the features that made MySpace MySpace have a place?  And I think, and I hope the answer to that is yes, that's not to dismiss some of the very serious problems with MySpace, both in terms of safety and security and some of the social components.  What if we think about the core offering a place where non-technical people can set up a personalised profile that requires more of a time commitment than entering the username and adding your profile photo to express themselves and connect with others?  I think there is a space for that.  

TW.   As someone with virtually no creative or technical capacity, even I can appreciate the appeal of expressing ourselves with a visual component and a visual component that goes beyond a selfie.  We've seen virtually every iteration I can imagine of this real-time, non-filtered, slightly filtered, completely filtered, fabricated entirely, and even emoji versions of ourselves and avatars.  At some point, we've got to move beyond this, and when we do, I hope texts will be an important part of whatever that is because it suits me best, which probably explains my attachment to AOL Instant Messenger and GChat. But some things are just better, or at least more fully expressed with a visual component.  MySpace offered that.  I also think sentimental or not.  It encouraged and allowed more thought about what we're sharing and to what extent.  There's a danger that having so much focus on creating our own page or profile could become self-obsessive.  We certainly don't need any more of that, But actually seeing and thinking about what we're putting out there more regularly, especially in an era of Snapchat, especially an era of Snapchats here now gone a second later, could be worthwhile

TW.  If you enjoyed hearing about the rise and fall of Myspace, look out for upcoming episodes on the rise and fall of Clubhouse and our discussion about whether Meta and X, formerly known as Twitter, are on the same trajectory. 

TW.  In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website.  You can find this and more information about us at TheBrightApp.com.

TW.  Until next time, I'm Taryn Ward.  Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines.