Myspace: Built in Ten Days, Sold for $580 Million, 50 Million Songs Lost

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Myspace was launched in August 2003 by marketers at eUniverse, including Brad Greenspan, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who cloned the best of Friendster and built the first version in ten days on ColdFusion. That fast, flexible code let users inject their own HTML into profiles, and eUniverse's existing list of about 20 million users and subscribers gave the site an instant audience. Greenspan overruled DeWolfe's idea of charging a fee. In July 2005 News Corporation bought Myspace for $580 million, beating Viacom, and by 2007 the site was adding 320,000 users a day and had passed Yahoo as the most visited website in the United States, launching artists like Lily Allen, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

A 2006 Google deal guaranteed $900 million over three years but required traffic targets that filled the site with ads and froze redesigns. Open HTML invited malware and spam, the Connecticut attorney general investigated, and Facebook passed Myspace in the Alexa rankings in April 2008. News Corp sold it in 2011 to Specific Media, with Justin Timberlake as a partner, for $35 million. Later owners included Time Inc., Meredith and Viant, and a 2019 server migration permanently erased all content uploaded before 2016.

In February 2005 Mark Zuckerberg offered to sell Facebook to Myspace for $75 million and was turned down.
At its 2008 peak Myspace earned $800 million in annual revenue and was valued at $12 billion.
Rupert Murdoch later called the original purchase a "huge mistake."
A breach of about 360 million accounts came to light in 2016, with data sold on the dark web.
An Internet Archive group rescued about 490,000 MP3s, called the Dragon Hoard, before the old servers were wiped.

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