Hi, welcome to another ColdFusion video. Myspace was one of the first social networking sites to reach mass adoption. It was worth 12 billion dollars and outranked Google as the most visited website on the internet. It was the place to be and took the world by storm.
I like Myspace a lot, it's a friendly environment to me, like I meet a lot of new friends. Great place to share music, videos. But I think every page you go to has got graphics and flashy stuff to catch your eye. Everyone had a MySpace account and they were all eager to find out what these new social networks were about.
And then, all of a sudden, people just... using it. Facebook overtook Myspace not because Facebook was good, it was the fault of Myspace themselves. This is the story of what killed Myspace. Ah, the 2000s.
When Napster and mp3 torrenting was king, iPods and Zooms were the hottest thing, hip-hop and emo were dominating the music scene, Prime TV was heroes and lost. Back then, YouTube was fresh. and all of the content being produced was unpredictable and exciting. Amongst this backdrop, but earlier in the decade, was one of the first popular social network sites. It wasn't Facebook or even MySpace.
It was Friendster, a social media networking site from Malaysia. Created in 2002, it showed a lot of promise. As Friendster grew, it inspired a few employees of eUniverse, an internet marketing company.
Among these employees was Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson. With these two at the helm, the eUniverse employees quickly began working on their own social networking site after realizing the potential of the Friendster concept. Using a rapid web development tool called ColdFusion, no relation, they had MySpace ready to launch within 10 days. Within the internal emails there was even a competition to see who could sign up the most friends with a thousand dollar cash prize being up for grabs.
Myspace launched in 2003 and grew quickly. People flocked to the site and it became the largest tech success to come out of Los Angeles. The first time I heard about Myspace was through a friend of mine.
I don't know what exactly it was but she told me it was something over the internet. You know you create your own account and profile. I know some people are like I hate Myspace, effing Myspace and then as soon as you're on Myspace.
they're like, oh who's that? And they start looking at pictures. My MySpace page has this picture that I created in Photoshop as my background. I'm a people person, I like to meet people.
It's just cool how you can meet people on the computer. This virtual realm. A couple of years later in 2005, MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for an enormous amount of $580 million.
Today, people are finally realizing that it makes sense to advertise in social networks or communities. Back then, no one believed that advertisers... ever come.
So, you know, there was a meeting between myself, Mr. Murdoch, Peter Chernin, and Ross where I explained the business model very simply. I said that, you know, this is the perfect media company. The users generate their own content, so you have no content content costs.
The users invite their friends, so you have no distribution or customer acquisition costs, and all you need to do is sell the ads. Literally at that moment, we knew a deal was done. I mean, a deal was done that quick.
We shook hands on a price. So you had the guy with the money in the room, he said yes, deal's done. 20 minutes later.
This signaled the first time that traditional media recognized the power of social networking. Things were looking good for MySpace. Earlier in the same year, MySpace was given the opportunity to purchase a small website called MySpace. called Facebook. However, Zuckerberg's asking price of $75 million was just too much in MySpace's eyes.
This is, perhaps, the first bullet that MySpace shot into its own foot, but they wouldn't realise it until it was too late. In 2006, only a year after News Corp's acquisition, MySpace was surpassed Google as the most visited site on the internet. I read that MySpace, I think it is, is the one that's just super popular. I mean, it's just huge.
They do like ratings now of social networks and it's just off the chart. Rupert Murdoch's news empire was evolving into the digital age. MySpace quickly became one of the future pillars of News Corp. 2007 was a great time for the company. It was the undisputed king of social networks. and its user base continued to grow.
But Facebook, that small startup which they had passed on acquiring only two years prior, was gaining momentum. But for now, it was MySpace's time. There was no reason for them to be looking over their shoulder.
MySpace had an 80% share of social networking traffic, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, had 10 times less traffic. MySpace boasted 300 million registered users and the company was now worth that 12 billion dollar mark. Why is this website so addicting? MySpace has totally changed my life.
It's a place where I can just spend all day doing absolutely nothing but chatting and posting. So how did you get into this website? One day I was surfing the internet, my friend told me about it and I checked it out and I haven't logged off for about a year and a half. The cracks began appearing soon after the acquisition. The founders, Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson, were now supposed to report to executives, and this usually meant jumping through corporate loops to get things done.
And this is a key factor. One main advantage that big companies is their ability to make decisions and implement them quickly. With its acquisition at the hands of a media giant, MySpace had lost its startup edge. The company had financial objectives to meet now.
Each quarter, executives stressed to meet advertising revenue targets. This meant that monetization was put ahead of the product and the consumer experience. News Corp was even trying to push lowbrow ads such as rotting teeth and weight loss, but Chris DeWolf had to fight hard to stop this from happening. All of this constrained MySpace. While across town, Facebook was free to add features as they pleased.
Facebook also allowed external developers to build new applications for the platform. MySpace, on the other hand, tried to build all of their apps in-house. This was a fatal flaw.
Soon, MySpace apps became filled with bugs, and the company struggled as they realised that they bit off more than they can chew. This, of course, led to bad user experiences. Another fundamental problem was the site's architecture.
Initially built with the software called Fusion, no relation, the site had soon outgrown the programming language. While it was good to get to market quickly and beat out the competition, it wasn't suitable for scaling MySpace past 2005. By now, it was too late to change to open source software, as this would have taken years to implement. This wasn't an option as MySpace was growing exponentially at this stage. So MySpace switched to.NET.
which was described by Chris DeWolf as Fred Flintstone building a database. It wasn't flexible and it was hated by developers. From the perspective of Myspace, all of these issues may have been easy to ignore as the website was still growing by 300,000 people per day.
However, Myspace's next problem couldn't be ignored so easily. Stories began to spread about minors being exposed to adult material on MySpace. In response, attorney generals all over the United States began launching investigations into the safety of MySpace.
The company had to quickly scramble to implement safety and privacy measures. As this happened, their development cycle turned into crisis management and innovation was left by the wayside. For Facebook, this controversy around MySpace was a blessing in disguise. The company was able to hide behind MySpace as they took the brunt of the public's concern. It's called MySpace.com.
It's a place on the internet where teens can socialize with other teens and meet new people. I do feel MySpace is a little frightening at times because I feel it's an open window for people that you don't know. I found out about it pretty much the way everybody else found out about it, you know, the way parents found out about it, my kid is on it. It can be bad.
You know, you get the messages from people who... are just kind of creepy. Kind of makes you wonder who's on Myspace. Myspace also couldn't build a proper spam filter so this only fueled the perception that Myspace was a seedy place. With buggy apps, extensive ads, and this new seedy perception, it was all too much, and MySpace had gone past the point of no return.
Soon, a shift in momentum happened. People began to switch over to Facebook, and in 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace and global users. With this, MySpace's fall from grace had begun. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, shifted his focus from MySpace to his latest acquisition, The Wall Street Journal. In 2009, with Rupert Murdoch seeming not to care about the company and being overrun with competitors such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the two founders, Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson, went on TV to speak with Charlie Rose.
It was a last-ditch effort to get Rupert Murdoch's attention. Perhaps this interview would make him realise the potential of MySpace again. It didn't work.
A few months later, founders resigned into lesser roles. In the coming months, 30% of MySpace's US employees and 66% of overseas employees were laid off. The new CEO of MySpace resigned only after just one year.
His successor lasted only four months. months the ship was sinking. Silicon Valley is buzzing about whether Rupert Murdoch will dump MySpace. Take a look I mean the company loses cash every year been losing cash since the new square bought it in 2005 and also it's losing traffic too. users leaving MySpace going to people like Facebook.
In fact, one user calls MySpace the CB radio of social networking sites. News Corp cut their losses in 2011 and MySpace was purchased for $35 million by Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake. Yes, Justin Timberlake the singer.
MySpace had multiple redesigns in an attempt to resuscitate the once most popular site in the world. But so far, nothing has worked, and MySpace has been sold two more times and is now in the hands of the Meredith Corporation. Another problem for MySpace is that you could easily delete your account, and it was permanent.
Facebook, on the other hand, was much harder to get rid of. Everything was waiting for you if you ever decided to come back on the platform. The newest direction for Myspace is music.
It's trying to become the social network of music lovers and musicians. This makes sense as Myspace was always heavily focused on the music aspect of the network, but looking at the site in 2019 it feels like a weird combination of news, YouTube and social networking. It's difficult to see what separates today's MySpace from any other website.
Meanwhile, Facebook is going all out. After buying WhatsApp and Instagram and integrating all of their chats in one platform, they just announced Facebook On the other hand though, Facebook is universally hated by the public and young people in western markets are leaving their core service in droves. I wonder how Myspace would have fared and how things would have been today if they had stayed the kings of social media.
You may remember Tom Anderson. He was everyone's first Myspace friend, a historical internet figure. But what happened to him?
These days, Tom finds himself in advisor roles, with his Twitter blurb up reading, enjoying being retired. His newest passion is photography. He travels around the world and actually takes some decent photos.
But apart from that, life seems pretty quiet for Tom these days. He's probably enjoying those millions that he earned from selling that company when it was near its prime. MySpace, once worth $12 billion.
It was the most visited site on the internet, had customisable profiles with music. It was the place to be in the mid-2000s. So what killed MySpace?
The outdated programming language. The pass on purchasing Facebook. The News Corp acquisition.
The unsafe and negative brand image. The ads all contributed to the demise of MySpace. Ultimately, it wasn't Facebook's superior product that won them the battle. It was Myspace's bad decisions.
Even Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, said that Facebook only won because Myspace blew it. And Myspace is another case where a company just blew it. Facebook had no chance to win. We should not have won the market.
The network effects at Myspace were so powerful. The only reason we won was because of the gross incompetence of Myspace systematically over a period of many years. Did I just say that publicly? And there you go.
It just goes to show that sometimes it's not about being the first, it's just about being the last. All that remains of Myspace today is the nostalgia. Oh man, my Myspace is banging. But Myspace is highly recommended and I love it. Are you glad you created one?
I'm glad I created all three of mine. So that was our look at Myspace. It was really interesting to take a look at the recent history of the 2000s. It was such a unique time and we were just entering a new paradigm.
It is amazing to see how our conceptions of social media has changed since then. Back then, it was new and exciting. Now, we're much more aware of all the dangers involved. Anyway, I would be interested to know your MySpace memories below. And if you're interested in seeing how social media has changed our society, I've got a video on that, which I'll link after this.
If you appreciate this content and you want to see more videos, don't forget to subscribe and share this video. It really helps me out. Alright, so I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys.
Have a good one.