The Most Ridiculous MySpace Names! The Tragic Decline of MySpace

Myspace was once the most popular website on the internet, even surpassing Google, but in 2004, the founders of Myspace met with a young man by the name of Mark Zuckerberg, who was interested in selling them his website, which was then known as Facebook. He requested 75 million dollars as payment, but Myspace turned him down, and why wouldn't they at the time Myspace was thriving and was by far the most popular social media platform. 

So how did Myspace go from being worth billions of dollars on one of the internet's most popular sites to being a nostalgic memory with its quirky interface and customizable profiles? Myspace represents the road not taken, the path social media could have taken before Facebook crossed the line, but the reasons Myspace failed are different from what you might think, and the rise and fall of Myspace is certainly not your typical business story.
This blog post is the truth about what happened to Myspace and how an internet empire was both built and destroyed.

Table of Contents

The Curious Beginning of MySpace

A foreign domain named myspace.com was initially bought for an internet storage business, essentially an early version of cloud hosting like Dropbox or Google Drives. In fact, a version of Myspace from the year 2000 can be found here. Still, the file storage company, like many early internet businesses, never made it, mainly after.com was acquired by The Internet Bubble Burst, and investors stopped pouring money into internet companies. However, a guy named Crystal Wolf bought the Myspace domain, thinking it might be helpful in the future. Of course, he was right, but he did nothing with it for a while. 

Instead, he and a friend named Tom Anderson founded a direct email marketing firm, Response Base, which created email newsletters for other companies. The original founders of Response Base, Chris and Tom, had still been working on it even after selling the business, and they realized they needed a new plan. Now, around the same time, early versions of social media sites had started to grow in popularity, for example, blog-type platforms such as Live Journal; however, the biggest inspiration for Myspace was a site called Friendster, which was founded in 2002 by Tom Anderson had seen what Friendster was doing, allowing people to connect online and share things with their friends. 

The concept was up-and-coming, but it had many issues. 

For example, Friendster had a closed system that made it difficult to connect with people you still needed to learn offline, plus it had other problems like very long page load times. Tom Anderson felt if the concept was done better, it had huge potential, so he approached his boss at Intermix Media with an idea for creating an improved Friendster without the restrictions of a successful social media site. Because Venture could help the company avoid spam emails and banner ads, the media agreed to the project, and Chris said he already had the perfect domain name for them to use: myspace.com.

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The Rapid Growth of MySpace

 
Myspace was officially launched to the public, offering a cash prize to whichever employee could sign up the most users. Myspace had a big advantage because of its parent company's foray into mixed media because they were a marketing company and had a very long list of email accounts they could advertise its new site to, plus, unlike Friendster, Myspace allowed users much greater freedom, such as the ability to view the profile of any other user. 

Countless teenagers would eventually learn to code in HTML to customize their Myspace homepage; thus, people's profiles became very creative; you could even choose what song you wanted to play when someone visited your page. This meant every person's page was very different and tailored to them, although there was one thing everyone on MySpace had in common: everyone started off with one friend. 

Start Of Web 2.0

They had already added co-founder Tom Henderson, so Myspace was up and running, and this was really the dawn of Web 2.0, whereas the early internet was mostly passive. Web 2.0 saw the rise of user-generated content. Myspace immediately started to gain a lot of traction, especially among teenagers, and of course they all told their friends about the site, so it would spread quickly. Thus, within just one month of launching, Myspace was registering 6, 000 new members every day Myspace's momentum accelerated when they decided to promote their site as a great way for musicians to build a following. Because file sharing sites like Napster and mp3.com had recently shut down, there needed to be more artists looking to promote themselves online.

 

So co-founders Chris and Tom spent several nights a week persuading bands to sign up for Myspace at LA clubs like The Viper Room. Not only did a lot of musicians join Myspace, but many of them started to gain popularity thanks to the site, including artists like Arctic Monkeys and Calvin Harris Lily Allen, Panic at the Disco, and countless others utilized Myspace to grow their fan bases and get their music heard. By February 2004, Myspace had 1 million users; by November, that number had risen to 5 million, with growth continuing to skyrocket from there. 

This led to some of the very first influences, such as Tila Tequila, who grew a very big following on MySpace Myspace was also instrumental in the early days of YouTube. Users were able to embed videos from YouTube directly onto their Myspace pages, and Myspace's vibe fit perfectly with the kind of offbeat homemade videos that were popular on early YouTube. However, while Myspace's ability to connect with anyone worldwide and completely customize your page attracted many users to the site instead of competitors like Friends, these features also began to create serious problems for foreign users.

 Problems & Legal Woes for MySpace

A five-part series by MSNBC highlighted the number of teenagers using sites like Myspace without their parent's knowledge and shows like "To Catch a Predator" stoked fears of online predators. There were also headlines about some adults using Myspace to pursue relationships with underage users Myspace sought the advice of the online safety group Wired Safety, which recommended that Myspace actually lower its minimum age requirement with the logic that this would encourage teens to be more truthful when registering and make it easier for Myspace to keep an eye on its most vulnerable users, but it was too late. There was one particularly tragic incident where a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meyer was relentlessly cyberbullied through Myspace, leading to her taking her own life, and this wasn't an isolated incident. 

Myspace gained a bad reputation for its lack of moderation, the number of young impressionable users who received abuse, and reports of miners being exposed to adult content, which is now officially prohibited. Myspace did employ moderators, but a handful of employees were responsible for sifting through the thousands of images uploaded daily, an impossible task. This not only sparked concerns from parents but also from advertisers; the lack of sufficient moderation made advertisers nervous, and despite the site's rapid growth, Myspace struggled to sell advertising, at least for very good prices. It's been reported that around this time, advertisers paid Myspace only 20 cents per thousand viewers, much lower than other similar sites.

 

The media also began to question whether the site was safe for its young user base, and the Myspace team was focusing on trying to address these issues while completely ignoring everything else. For example, in October 2005, a 19-year-old hacker named Sami Kamkar used Myspace to release the world's fastest-spreading computer virus. Trojan Intimix eventually agreed to pay fines of 7.5 million dollars. Because Myspace's parent company had such a bad reputation, the founders attempted to distance themselves from it. There are reports that the Myspace founders got angry when Myspace t-shirts were produced that also had the Intermix logo on them. And yet, despite all of these problems, cyberbullying and the lack of moderation continue. Despite the security holes, the poor infrastructure, and the negative media attention, Myspace continued to grow quickly; it was simply fun to use, and people kept referring their friends to the site. But at this moment in 2005, a turning point in Myspace history occurred when Myspace co-founder Krista Wolf met with Mark Zuckerberg about the possibility of Facebook acquiring Myspace. Zuckerberg wanted 75 million dollars for his company, which Crystal thought was too expensive, so the deal never went ahead. Of course, now that we know Facebook later became worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars, this looks like a pretty terrible choice, but to be fair, back then, 75 billion dollars was a huge prize for a fairly new, unproven internet company, so was it easy for us to look back with hindsight? Remember that even Myspace, which was much bigger than Facebook at the time, was making little profit. Still, the decision not to buy Facebook meant that the two companies would soon be in a direct battle. But first, let's introduce an unexpected character in the Myspace story.

Rupert Murdoch's Money Machine 

Despite its problems, Myspace had finally reached profitability; it was a small profit, but it was proof that money was to be made here. What was even more clear is that MySpace attracted a lot of attention, and as a result, several legacy media giants saw it as an attractive prospect and became interested in acquiring it. A bidding war was sparked between Viacom and News Corp, which was eventually won by News Corp, owner of the Fox networks, and much, much more. News Corp paid $580 million for mixed media, despite everyone knowing that, of all the sites owned by the internet, Myspace had piqued their interest. 

This seemed like a large sum to pay for the site at the time, as many people were skeptical that advertisers would ever pay much to advertise on social media, but it was reported that Myspace founders were able to convince Rupert Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, to buy the company in just one meeting, as they told him Myspace was actually the perfect media company because users generate content themselves, so there's no content cost, and users generate content. Murdoch loved this, and thus the deal was agreed, and for a little while, after News Corp bought the business, things were going great. 

By July 2006, MySpace had 54 million monthly visitors, and 75-year-old Rupert Murdoch appeared on the cover of Wire with the headline Rupert Murdoch, Teen Idol, News Corp. MySpace's future, on the other hand, hopes that Rupert Murdoch's money will save MySpace and help them fix their problems.

 

This acquisition by News Corp. had the opposite effect: Myspace became more corporate and bureaucratic after being bought by News Corp., which slowed them down. They also now had stricter advertising rules. Revenue targets the heads, and so monetization was prioritized above the product, and since ad rates were low, this meant News Corp just pushed more and more ads, including very low-quality spammy ads that annoyed users. Ultimately, Murdoch viewed the site as a money machine rather than a long-term business investment. He'd envisioned Myspace more as a way to distribute new Squad media than as a community platform. On the other hand, Facebook initially only allowed people with verified college email addresses to join their platform, which would help give the site a feeling of exclusivity and height. 

Facebook Vs. MySpace (A Unwanted War)

It was in 2005 that Facebook dropped its college email address requirement and opened it to the whole world. Furthermore, unlike Myspace, Facebook had venture capital funding and was thinking long-term; they operated more like a fast-moving startup because they had a different kind of bureaucracy and corporate bosses demanding advertising targets. As Facebook started to gain more momentum, it was soon clear that Facebook and Myspace were in very direct competition and that there was only going to be one winner in this war for attention
 
Despite the fact that they were both social media sites, Facebook and Myspace were always distinct; for example, Facebook's design was minimalist with limited customization; everyone's page had the same format unless the site looked the same for everyone. Myspace was extremely customizable, but it essentially created a lot of issues, such as users clogging profiles with custom codes, slowing down browsers, or some profiles even playing songs or videos automatically, which a lot of people found very annoying. It was messy and chaotic because most people are not good designers, and allowing people to do whatever they wanted meant people's profiles were often unreadable, had horrible color clashes, and were filled with advertisements. While some people like this device, it had to take shape Myspace was more for teenagers, and Facebook was more for college students and adults as it seemed to have a wider mass appeal. 

Facebook maintained a very clean, consistent, and user-friendly experience across the whole site, so while Myspace was great for kids who'd grown up on the Internet, Facebook seemed more organized and easy to use for everyone else Because everyone's Pages were so unique, MySpace's more customized approach made introducing new features much more difficult and time-consuming. On the other hand, with its sleeker, more uniform approach, Facebook could move faster. They also let external developers create apps for Facebook, whereas MySpace mostly tried to do everything themselves, which meant they were slower to develop new features. Facebook's introduction of the newsfeed feature also made Facebook feel more like a community, and it began to grow a lot faster. But for now, Myspace is still the world's leading social media service, and its user base was still growing quickly.
 
In June 2006, versions were released in the UK, Australia, and Germany, followed by versions for a dozen other countries. According to Emarketer, Myspace generated 180 million dollars in revenue in the United States alone in 2006, which was twice the combined revenue of Facebook Friendster and AOL Instant Messenger at its peak in January 2007. Myspace was registering 320 000 new members a day, so Myspace still had the advantage despite Facebook's recent growth. In June 2007 came the launch of Myspace TV, including a TMZ celebrity gossip channel and Myspace's first original program, Roommates. 

The thing is, MySpace was missing where the real money was in social media. That same year, 2007, Facebook launched its Facebook ads platform, leveraging user data to create an ad system that let advertisers target users based on their interests. Use all of the personal data Facebook has on its users to target users very specifically. This was extremely useful for advertisers, and that's very profitable for Facebook. They moved faster than Myspace and attracted more advertisers. On the other hand, Myspace continued to have internal issues and disagreements; they tried several new CEOs, but the first one left after a year and the next after just four months. Myspace began to lose both money and traffic each year, and it didn't help that Myspace's website had initially been built using a software called "cold fusion. This had been good at the time as it allowed them to build the Myspace website extremely quickly and get it to market fast, but it now meant Myspace's infrastructure needed to be more scalable and created a bunch of technical challenges. Ultimately, with its buggy applications, the annoying ads plastered everywhere, and its CD reputation in the media, Myspace's popularity was starting to fall.

The Tragic Decline of MySpace

 
Facebook had overtaken Myspace in terms of users. It's hard to imagine today, but Facebook was seen as the cool new thing back then. The momentum had shifted, and because social platforms rely on network effects, many others follow once more users start switching to a different platform. If that's where the action is now, Myspace's popularity has plummeted. Their monthly users dropped by 44. One of the same problems that helped Myspace beat Friendster in the first place was that in 2009, both Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson left their roles with Intermix Media. 

The overall staff was reduced by 47 during this period, And by this point, Rupert Murdoch himself had also lost interest in Myspace. Thus, in June 2011, News Corp sold Myspace to a mixed media company for an estimated 35 million dollars, a tiny fraction of what they paid for it. Over the next few years, Myspace was sold several more times at lower and lower prices to various different companies that wrongly believed they could save the site. Myspace became a dimly remembered artifact of social media before Facebook's dominance, but to say Facebook killed Myspace is a bit of an oversimplification because Myspace could and should have won; it's just that they made so many bad decisions themselves.

 

In fact, Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, described it this way, and Myspace is another case where a company just blew it. Facebook had no chance to win, and you should not have won the market. Myspace's network effects were so powerful that the only reason we won was due to Myspace's systematic gross competence over many years. While that may be a little harsh, it's hard to deny that Myspace had a huge lead on Facebook and that, with some better decisions, they could have perhaps remained the king of social media, and it would be interesting to see how different the world might have been if they had. It had accidentally deleted nearly two decades' worth of music that had been uploaded to Myspace, much of it by unsigned artists without official releases, meaning there might not have been another copy.

This was just another example of poor management and mistakes in Myspace's troubled history. Of course, for lots of people, Myspace still brings back many fond memories, and as for everyone's old friend Tom, the whole Myspace experience wasn't really a failure for him at all; he made millions of dollars from selling his sights and is now happily retired, traveling the world and enjoying his level of photography, although as he shares his photos on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, he must surely think about what could have been if Myspace had made some better decisions. Speaking of internet companies that were once very successful but then lost their dominance after turning down the chance to buy Facebook, have you heard about Yahoo?

In the one hand Myspace grew from huge to small, while on the other hand Louis Vuitton gree from small to big. Know the business review of  The Most Valuable Luxury fashion Brand, Louis Vuitton

Content Data: MagnatesMedia

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