MySpace
A place for friends
MySpace was the world's biggest social network in the mid-2000s, launched in August 2003 and bought by News Corp for $580 million in 2005. Facebook overtook it in 2008-2009, News Corp dumped it for $35 million in 2011, and it survives today as a music site nobody visits: a textbook zombie.
Timeline
- 2003
-
August 2003
Launch
MySpace launches
Built inside eUniverse to compete with Friendster.
- 2005
-
18 July 2005
Acquisition
News Corp announces $580M Intermix acquisition
MySpace becomes the centrepiece of Fox Interactive Media.
- 2006
-
11 July 2006
Peak
Most-visited website in the United States
MySpace passes Yahoo and Google in US visits (Hitwise).
-
8 August 2006
Funding
Google pays $900 million for search rights
A three-year advertising deal that briefly makes the News Corp purchase look like a bargain.
- 2008
-
May 2008
Decline
Facebook passes MySpace in worldwide visitors
The crossover point; US follows in May 2009.
- 2009
-
16 June 2009
Decline
MySpace lays off 30% of staff
Almost 1,400 people go as traffic and ad revenue slide against Facebook.
- 2011
-
29 June 2011
Acquisition
News Corp sells MySpace for $35 million
Specific Media buys; ~94% loss on the purchase price.
- 2016
-
11 February 2016
Acquisition
Time Inc. acquires Myspace parent Viant
The brand changes hands again, this time for its ad-targeting data.
- 2019
-
March 2019
Incident
12 years of uploaded music lost
A server migration destroys files uploaded 2003-2015: an estimated 50 million songs.
How it looked
Ownership
Key figures
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users ▲ | 75.9 million | December 2008 | Reported US unique visitors at the peak (comScore) |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down
Our analysis: MySpace was never formally shut down; it bled users to Facebook from 2008 onward and survives as a music-focused zombie site. The 2019 server migration that lost 12 years of uploaded music erased most of what made it historically valuable.
History
The first giant
MySpace launched in August 2003 out of eUniverse, an LA marketing company, built in months by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe to out-Friendster 
Friendster. Where Friendster policed its users, MySpace let them run wild: custom HTML profiles, glitter graphics, autoplaying songs, and Tom as everyone's first friend. It became the home of emo bands, scene kids and a generation's self-expression.
$580 million up, $35 million down
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace's parent Intermix for $580 million in July 2005, and for a while it looked cheap: in 2006 MySpace was the most-visited website in America. But the product stagnated under corporate revenue targets while Facebook shipped features. The crossover came in 2008-2009, and the collapse was fast. News Corp sold MySpace to Specific Media (with Justin Timberlake attached) for $35 million in June 2011. The site still exists as a music community, which makes it the canonical zombie: alive in DNS, dead in culture. In 2019 a botched server migration destroyed every song, photo and video uploaded before 2016.
Similar projects
Google+
The social network everyone was signed up to and nobody used
2011–2019
Digg
The front page of the web, until v4
2004–2012
Friendster
The social network that came first
2002–2015
Orkut
Brazil's living room, built in a 20% project
2004–2014
Yahoo Answers
The internet's strangest Q&A community
2005–2021
ICQ
The messenger that gave you a number
1996–2024
Sources
- News Corporation to Acquire Intermix Media, Inc. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 18 July 2005 [archived]
- News Corp. Takes Huge Loss Selling MySpace For $35 Million NPR 29 June 2011 [archived]
- Myspace Acquired, CEO Out: Email From Mike Jones To Employees TechCrunch 29 June 2011 [archived]
Last verified: 11 August 2026