What happened to Myspace? Here are the reasons for its failure!

What is your favorite social media platform? If you ask this question anyone today they may answer Instagram or Tiktok or even Facebook, but do you know there was a time when Myspace was one of the most favorite and most visited social media platforms in the world? Then what leads to its downfall?

Myspace is one of the first social media websites to reach mass adoption. It is a social media platform where people used to share music, videos, and photos. We can also find new people and chat with them. You can add a profile picture, write about yourself, and your contact information, and also you can add your blogs.

But today Myspace pivoted and now works as a platform for sharing music and videos showcasing the music artist and their work.

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Index:

Creation of the company:

Myspace was launched on 1st August 2003 by Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Jon Hart. They got inspired by another social media network Friendster. Tom was a vocalist for swank, a San Francisco band and later Tom worked at xdrive technologies as an editor of the marketing department and Chris was vice president of sales and marketing at the same company. The company gets closed in 2001 so they created a company called Response base. Later that company was acquired by an internet marketing company called euniverse.

On seeing the huge success of the Friendster concept they started creating their own social media network Myspace in 10 days by using a rapid web development tool called Adobe ColdFusion.

myspace bizzbucket — Chris DeWolfe & Tom Anderson (Founder of the Myspace)

Rise of the kingdom

When Myspace was created the music industry was at stake. There were illegal downloads of songs all over the internet. Myspace used this opportunity to become partners with the labels to reach the content in different ways. There were attractive graphics and music all over the website where you can share your content that attracted more youngsters and artists. Myspace was a platform where we can attain stardom over a night. Stars like Lily Allen and bands like Arctic Monkey got famous by this platform.

Competitor analysis:

In 2003 when Myspace was launched their only biggest competitors were Friendster and Linkedin. In 2006 Myspace surpassed Google as the most visited website on the internet. Later in 2007 Qzone, a social media website based in china became a competitor for Myspace surpassing the number of users in Myspace.

After that Myspace kept going downhill and never raised. Later Facebook became the number 1 one social media platform still holding the more number of users. Later in 2009 LinkedIn and twitter surpassed Myspace holding more users. By the year 2011 Myspace was out of the top 10 social media platforms and also out of the competition. The current competitors are Bebo, Meetup, Spotify, etc but myspace is not even near to its competitor.

Valuation of the company, revenue & funding:

Myspace makes revenue by advertising, not by the subscription-based model. It gained revenue by advertising and network marketing. Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a Google search facility and advertising on Myspace in 2006. The current revenue of Myspace is 10.9 crores USD.

In 2006 Myspace had an advertising revenue of about 200 million. In 2007 it was above 400 million and in 2006 it had nearly 600 million. Later it started falling and in 2011 it was less than 200 million.

In 2005 the company was acquired by News Corporation for 580 million USD. In 2008 it was said that Myspace was worth about 12 billion USD. Later it was sold to a company called specific media for only 35 million USD. Now it is owned by vant technology which has about 150 employees and their current Alexa ranking is about 2436.

Business model:

Failure analysis:

Myspace was the biggest online platform from 2005-2008 with nearly 100 million users. The scenario started to change when the company was acquired by News corporation in 2005. The founders Tom and Charlie need to report to executives. They need to get permission from executives to implement what they want. The company started focusing more on advertisements and filled the website with advertisements. The users started to get frustrated because of loads of advertisements.

Also, at the same time, their competitor Facebook allowed external developers to build any applications for their platform, where Myspace tried to build all their applications in Hand.

Myspace started filled with bugs which the company was struggling to remove. It had weak site architecture that was developed by adobe ColdFusion and later changed to dotnet which was hated by developers. There were stories of minors being exposed to adult contents in Myspace which created a public panic and an investigation was started about the safety of Myspace.

The recent scandal happened in march 2019 was the loss of all files uploaded between 2003 to 2015 which made remaining users close their account and look for other reliable alternatives.

Possible fixes:

Myspace had an outdated website architecture which they should have updated with a good technical in-house team. Also, there were many advertisements on the website which should have been controlled.

They didn’t show much attention to their growing competitors which reduces their user engagement on a large scale. In 2005 Facebook came to the sale for 75 million USD to News corporations. They felt it was too much for Facebook so they turned down the offer which was their biggest mistake.

Right now Myspace is active. Its main focus is on music and musical artists. Right now it works as a combination of Youtube, Spotify, and google news. Once an online platform with 100 million users, 12 billion worth, surpassing google and becoming the highest-visited website, myspace was the king of social media. Lack of focus on the trend and growing competitors put an end to its rule over social media.

Do tell us what you think!

Come on! Tell us what you think of our startup failure analysis on “MySpace” in the comment section.

Also, don’t forget to download our Android app which contains startup case studies and business book insights, verified business concepts, and no bullshit!!

Was MySpace shut down?

Right now Myspace is active. Its main focus is on music and musical artists. Right now it works as a combination of Youtube, Spotify, and google news. Once an online platform with 100 million users, 12 billion worth, and surpassing google and becoming the highest visited website, myspace was the king of social media.

Is MySpace still around 2020?