MySpace – The Behemoth That Lies Dead

Yesterday while chatting with my colleagues on Webex, I was reminded of something that I rarely think about these days and have barely given a thought to in probably 13 to 15 years – MySpace. MySpace was the biggest social network site online during the mid-to-late 2000s, with over 75 million users a month at its peak. Unfortunately for them Facebook took over and it became obsolete. The rise of MySpace can be attributed to timing and accessibility. The platform was launched in 2003 and was one of the first social media sites.

MySpace offered a service that was non-restrictive, let users customize their own pages, and added new features based on user demand. It also attracted a lot of creative people and allowed brands and users to interact with each other as a sort of precursor to modern-day influencers. MySpace’s success caught the eye of the media conglomerate News Corporation, which bought the social media site in 2005 for $580 million. According to former employees, corporate greediness and legal interference led to the downfall. MySpace became inundated with intrusive ads, many of which led to dubious pages asking users to sign up for credit cards and other services.

Ultimately, a failure to focus on what its community wanted and the usability of the site saw users leave for other platforms. The website still exists today as a social media platform focussed mainly on music, but it is much smaller in scale and nowhere near the behemoth it once was. Currently, Myspace has been placed in a read-only mode of sorts, as no new articles have been published since early 2022, the site is basically dead.

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