MySpace: How a $12 Billion Social Network Destroyed Itself

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MySpace began in August 2003 as a pragmatic copy of Friendster, built in just 10 days by employees of an internet marketing company called eUniverse. Written in ColdFusion instead of Java, it could add features at a blistering pace, and a mailing list of 20 million subscribers solved the empty room problem overnight. Its real hook was freedom: users could edit their pages with raw HTML, and teenagers turned profiles into glittering, chaotic expressions of identity. Bands uploaded MP3s, fans embedded the players, and careers like those of Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, and Taylor Swift took off.

Then came the money. News Corporation bought the site for $580 million in July 2005, and a three-year, $900 million advertising deal with Google locked the company into delivering staggering ad volumes. Pages froze under the weight of third-party ads, spam and malware spread, and users walked across the street to a cleaner Facebook. This episode follows the fall from a $12 billion valuation to a $35 million fire sale, a breach of almost 360 million accounts, and the loss of 12 years of uploaded history.

• In 2005 the founders turned down a young Mark Zuckerberg, who offered to sell them Facebook for $75 million.
• By 2006 the site had passed Google and Yahoo as the most visited website in the United States, and by 2007 it counted over 300 million registered users.
• The Google contract worked as golden handcuffs: any redesign that reduced ad impressions risked violating it, so the cluttered, sluggish pages stayed.
• Facebook overtook the site globally by April 2008 and in the US by May 2009. In 2011 News Corporation sold it to Specific Media, which partnered with Justin Timberlake on a revival.
• In 2019 the company announced a server migration had permanently lost everything uploaded before 2015, including over 50 million songs.