MySpace Launches — The First Hegemon of the Friend-Graph Web

In August 2003, inside a Los Angeles marketing company called eUniverse, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe stood up a site called MySpace. It went live roughly six months before thefacebook.com began running out of a Harvard dormitory.

MySpace would become the first reigning platform of the category we now call social networking. From 2005 to 2008, it was the world's largest social network and briefly led US web traffic, eclipsing Google. From 2008 onward, Facebook crushed it without quarter. The history of social media properly begins with that rise and fall.

Origin — A Marketing Company's Side Project

MySpace was not a pure startup. Its parent, eUniverse, was a publicly listed marketing company doing internet advertising and email. Watching Friendster's explosive growth, eUniverse decided to clone the model in-house. The build, by various accounts, took about ten days.

Three roles defined the founding team:

• Tom Anderson, a one-time band musician turned programmer. By design he became every new user's first "friend"—the smiling "Tom from Myspace" of the era's collective memory.
• Chris DeWolfe, an eUniverse marketer who led the business side and would become CEO.
• eUniverse engineers, who handled the back end.

The design ethos was sharp: more freedom than Friendster, more flamboyant than LiveJournal. Letting users write raw HTML and CSS into their profile page turned out to fit teenage self-expression perfectly.

Two Pillars — Personalisation and Music

MySpace's edge had two pillars.

A personalised web. Users could repaint their profile pages by pasting in CSS. Black backgrounds, autoplaying songs, scrolling marquee text—a web designer's nightmare, but the right answer for a generation that wanted to decorate its own bedroom online. It was the most extreme realisation of the Web 2.0 slogan "users make the web".

A distribution hub for indie music. The embedded music player on every profile was a revolution for bands trying to circulate demos. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Kate Nash—a wave of mid-2000s acts broke through MySpace. Connecting directly with fans, bypassing the labels: the prototype that SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and Spotify artist pages would all inherit.

On those two pillars, MySpace exploded. At the July 2005 acquisition it had 16 million monthly users; by January 2006 it was signing up 200,000 new users a day; and on 9 August 2006 the hundred-millionth MySpace account was created, in the Netherlands.

The US$580 Million News Corp Acquisition

In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired MySpace's parent Intermix Media for about US$580 million. It was a large deal for the period, called at the time "a legacy media empire buying its ticket to the internet age".

Murdoch's plan was to push News Corp's content—Fox, The Sun, the New York Post—through MySpace and turn it into a portal-scale ad network. On 7 August 2006 it signed an exclusive search-and-advertising deal with Google, under which Google guaranteed minimum revenue-share payments of US$900 million between the first quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2010. In June 2006 MySpace passed Yahoo! and Google Search to become the most visited website in the United States, and at its April 2008 peak it drew roughly 115 million monthly visitors worldwide.

Decline — Facebook and Internal Sclerosis

In April 2008, Facebook passed MySpace in global traffic; in US uniques the crossover came in May 2009. Everything from there was a slide.

Technical sclerosis. Under News Corp ownership, MySpace could not execute a deep platform refactor. Its flamboyant custom profiles became fatally heavy on mobile; the site grew bloated with bugs and ads.

Strategic drift. News Corp tried to run MySpace as a media portal, piling on video, music, and games. Facebook held a single line—the friends' news feed—and polished it relentlessly: News Feed (2006), the developer platform (2007), the Like button (2009).

Talent loss. Anderson and DeWolfe departed in 2009. Without its core, MySpace lost direction and became a series of layoffs and sale negotiations.

On 29 June 2011, News Corp sold MySpace to Specific Media for about US$35 million. Roughly 94 per cent of value evaporated in six years. Justin Timberlake was part of the buying group and tried to refloat it as a music network, but the audience never came back.

The Form Factor Everyone Inherited

MySpace is mostly remembered as a cautionary tale, but it left a lot.

The SNS form factor. Profile page plus friends list: every social network after MySpace inherited that structure. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—each user still has a "my page".

The direct-to-fan music pipeline. The route that bypassed labels and let bands reach listeners directly was inherited by SoundCloud (2007), Bandcamp (2008), and Spotify's artist pages.

A precedent that web hegemony does not last. News Corp bought it for US$580 million and sold it for US$35 million six years later—the prototype for every later "big-media internet acquisition failure", from Yahoo's Tumblr (US$1.1 billion → roughly US$3 million) to Microsoft's aQuantive (US$6.3 billion, mostly written off).

There is also the postscript: Tom Anderson took his tens of millions from the sale and reinvented himself as a touring travel photographer—an early archetype for the social-founder "after the burn-out" arc.

The social-media timeline truly begins here.