What made MySpace the biggest site in America?
MySpace was created in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, two employees of the internet marketing company eUniverse, which was later renamed Intermix Media. It was not the first social network. It was the first one that handed the page layout to the user.
Every profile was an editable HTML window. People pasted code into a text box and got tiled backgrounds, autoplaying songs, custom cursors and a Top 8 friends list that ran real social politics in American high schools. The pages were often unreadable. They were also unmistakably personal, which is the part no mainstream platform has matched since.
Music was the second engine. Bands set up profiles, uploaded songs and reached listeners without a label in between, and a generation of American teenagers found new acts on profile pages rather than on the radio.
By the summer of 2006 the combination made MySpace the most visited site in the country. Hitwise put 4.5 percent of all US internet visits on MySpace in the week ending July 8, 2006, ahead of Yahoo Mail, Google and MSN, although that ranking counted visits and page views rather than unique users. At its peak the site drew about 70 million unique monthly visitors.
How did the News Corporation deal change the site?
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. The reasoning was straightforward: the largest audience on the web, bought by a company that knew how to sell advertising against an audience.
A year later, News Corporation put that audience under contract. In August 2006 its internet arm, Fox Interactive Media, made Google the exclusive search and keyword advertising provider across its sites, MySpace included. The announcement filed with the SEC spells out the terms: Google owed "guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to Fox Interactive Media of $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments," paid between the first quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2010.
Read that clause as a MySpace product manager in 2007 and the job description writes itself. The money was not attached to whether anyone enjoyed the site. It was attached to traffic and to the volume of pages served. Ads multiplied, pages that were already slow under custom HTML got slower, and any change that reduced the number of clicks in a session worked against the number the company had promised Wall Street.
The site kept growing for a while anyway, which is the trap. Traffic and page views held up long enough to make the strategy look sound, and by the time the audience numbers turned, the product decisions that would have kept people there had been deferred for three years.
Why did people switch to Facebook?
Facebook offered the opposite bargain. Every profile looked the same: no autoplay, no glitter, no layout a teenager could break with one unclosed tag. Pages loaded quickly and predictably, which mattered more each month as MySpace profiles grew heavier with custom code and advertising.
The News Feed did the rest. Instead of walking profile to profile to find out what friends were doing, a Facebook user got the updates collected in one place. MySpace never shipped an equivalent that users kept.
Facebook also grew in the opposite direction. It started closed, on college campuses, where a university email address was the entry ticket, then opened outward from a base of real names. MySpace was going the other way, fighting spam accounts, fake profiles and a reputation problem with American parents that never attached itself to Facebook.
Network effects reward the leader and punish it just as fast when the direction flips. Once a user's friends had moved, staying on MySpace meant talking to an empty room. Facebook passed MySpace among American users in 2009, and MySpace's traffic never recovered. The same reversal had already taken Friendster apart a few years earlier, with MySpace as the beneficiary.
What did the collapse cost News Corporation?
On June 29, 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to the advertising targeting firm Specific Media for $35 million in cash and stock. That was well under the $100 million News Corporation had been asking for the site, and a fraction of the $580 million it paid six years earlier. Justin Timberlake joined the buying group as an investor and a public face for the relaunch.
The sale price is the number everyone remembers, but it understates the damage. News Corporation also spent six years of management attention, a run of executive turnover, and the traffic commitments it had written into the Google agreement, on a property that ended up worth less than a mid-size office building.
The music paid a price too. A later server migration destroyed the audio people had uploaded in MySpace's early years, taking with it recordings by artists who never released their work anywhere else. An independent music archive disappeared while the industry was still working out what the file-sharing era had done to it, a story covered in our look at what Napster did to the music business.
Is MySpace still around in 2026?
Yes, in a narrow sense. The address still resolves, the front page still publishes music news, and old profiles still render. What is gone is the social network: there is no active community, and the site functions as a music and nostalgia property rather than a place people post to. Our companion piece on what is left of the site walks through the current state in detail.
Ownership traces straight back to the 2011 sale. Specific Media grew into Viant Technology, the advertising technology company run by brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook, and Viant has held MySpace ever since.
The owners say they are not finished with it. In a 2026 documentary about the site, Tim Vanderhook said: "We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace." No launch date has been announced, no product has been shown, and Tom Anderson, the first friend on every new account in the 2000s, is not part of the plan.
What the collapse taught the platforms that came after
MySpace's real legacy is not a feature. It is the proof that a dominant social network can lose its audience in about three years, from the peak in 2006 to the American crossover in 2009, and that the loss is close to irreversible once it starts.
The lesson companies took from it was mostly defensive: standardize the layout, keep the feed fast, and buy or copy anything growing. The lesson users took was different. Interest in handmade personal pages never fully went away, and projects like Neocities and SpaceHey, a deliberate MySpace clone, exist because people still want a page that looks like a person made it rather than a template with a photo slot.
The other lesson holds for everything that followed MySpace onto the web. A site that starts optimizing for the number it promised an advertiser, rather than for the reason people showed up, gets to keep that number for about as long as it takes users to find the next place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did MySpace lose to Facebook?
MySpace lost to Facebook because it optimized for advertising volume instead of the experience. After News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and signed a $900 million search and advertising agreement with Google in 2006 that depended on traffic commitments, the site filled with ads and slowed down, while Facebook offered fast, standardized profiles and the News Feed. Facebook passed MySpace among American users in 2009.
When did Facebook overtake MySpace?
Facebook overtook MySpace in the United States in 2009, two years before News Corporation sold MySpace in June 2011. MySpace had been the most visited website in the country in the summer of 2006, with about 70 million unique monthly visitors at its peak, so the reversal took roughly three years from peak to defeat.
Who created MySpace?
MySpace was created in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, who were working at the internet marketing company eUniverse, later renamed Intermix Media. Anderson became the automatic first friend on every new MySpace account, which is why a generation of American users knew him simply as Tom. Neither founder is involved with MySpace under its current owner, Viant Technology, which bought the site as Specific Media in 2011.