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Farewell Tom: The Rise & Fall of Myspace · Mini Scroll

0:00
In April 2005, I arrived home from school and snuck into the
0:04
designated computer room in my family's suburban home.
0:07
I was 13 years old, wearing a zip up velour tracksuit, no
0:11
doubt, and had just heard about a new website calledmyspace.com
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from one of my friends at school.
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Sitting down at my family's desktop, PCI fired up Internet
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Explorer, typed in the domain, and entered my e-mail address,
0:25
swimmingqueen33@hotmail.com, to register.
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Within months all of my friends had joined the site and by the
0:33
time I started high school in the fall, we had all swapped.
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Hours a night chatting on MSN Messenger for hours a night
0:39
clicking around on Myspace. The site was exciting.
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Unlike other social networking sites and chat rooms we tried.
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It felt like there were no rules on Myspace.
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We could message our friends, discover new music, customize
0:51
our profiles to suit our ever changing teenage personalities,
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and best of all, we could stalk any profile we wanted.
0:58
There was so an element of exclusivity to Myspace with its
1:02
Top 8A feature that allowed users to rank their favorite
1:05
friends from numbers 1 to 8. As teenage girls.
1:08
Part of a competitive friend group, Top Eight gave us an easy
1:11
opportunity to raise the social stakes.
1:14
Despite this initial thrill, our interest in Myspace quickly
1:17
died. By 2006, most of my friends were
1:20
primarily interacting on Facebook, and two years later I
1:23
logged on to my Myspace account for the very last time as 90s
1:27
babies. My friends and I were the
1:29
Myspace generation, but regardless of the sites
1:32
unprecedented success, it couldn't hold my generations
1:35
attention for longer than a few years.
1:37
From Centennial World, I'm Lauren Meisner, and This is
1:41
Infinite Scroll, a podcast about Internet culture, the creator
1:45
economy, and how social media is shaping Gen.
1:48
Zed. Welcome back to Infinite Scroll
1:51
everyone. Oh my God, I am so excited
1:54
because today, this morning we launched Mini Scroll.
1:58
So you guys will have seen there's been like, I don't know,
2:01
maybe two or three episodes before this one goes live since
2:03
last weeks and it's so exciting. The reception so far, even just
2:07
in the first couple hours has been honestly amazing.
2:10
I am just so excited to be bringing you guys so much more
2:13
content every single week. So that's been the big project
2:15
for me in the last, you know, few weeks, but like definitely
2:19
few days. It's been a big thing to get off
2:22
the ground and we had next weekend in there as well, and
2:24
Sean and I went up to Tamworth to visit his family.
2:27
That's where he's from. So it was really nice.
2:29
Like, I did have a proper break over the weekend, but I had to
2:32
work extra hard to get that break because I knew I needed to
2:35
take like two or three days off without working at all, which to
2:38
be fair, I normally wouldn't do under normal circumstances.
2:43
But especially with everything that's gone on since the
2:46
beginning of the year, I haven't had like a single day where I
2:49
can't work. So I really focused on getting a
2:52
solid break. I think I did 3 full days of no
2:55
work. Yeah, I did 3 full days of no
2:57
work, Friday, Saturday, Sunday over Easter and it was so nice.
3:00
I do feel refreshed, I feel revived and I'm very excited and
3:04
I'm also really freaking excited for this episode.
3:06
Myspace holds such a special place in the heart of a
3:11
millennial and I know we talked so much about TikTok and just
3:14
like Gen. Z things here on this podcast
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and that is obviously like the crux of the podcast.
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But diving into millennial Internet culture is something
3:23
that I'm looking forward to getting into a little bit more
3:26
as the podcast evolves. I think a lot of you guys are
3:29
interested, even if you are Gen. Z in like what our experience
3:32
online was in those early days because it's so different than
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it is now. And this episode again, I just,
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I needed a little bit more levity.
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Like I needed something more fun to cover this week.
3:44
So I am bringing you the rise and fall of Myspace.
3:47
But as always, if you guys like this episode, if you like my
3:50
podcast, Please remember to rate, review and subscribe.
3:53
It means so much. It helps my business grow.
3:55
It helps the podcast grow. It like, literally makes my
3:59
life. Please also sign up to our
4:00
newsletter, which is called Infinite Scroll.
4:03
On Wednesdays we send out a commentary article about a trend
4:07
creator, drama or news. And on Fridays we round up the
4:10
five biggest thing on the Internet from that week.
4:13
Join our Geneva group as well, which is called Infinite Scroll
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where you can chat with other people who are obsessed with
4:18
Internet culture and creator drama NT.
4:21
And you can also chat with me. All right, on to the reviews.
4:23
I just have a couple YouTube comments that I wanted to read.
4:26
So one is from ERG 9822, who said I always find myself
4:30
intrigued by the topics used on this pod.
4:32
Also, I really like your personality.
4:34
Thank you. That is so sweet.
4:36
And then, OK, I'm not going to try someone else.
4:43
I'm sorry I can't read your username, said so excited for
4:46
Mini Scroll. It'll be the perfect content for
4:48
that 20 minutes of sitting in my car before work.
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Exactly. That is the whole point.
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So as an Internet culture podcast, I thought it was about
4:59
time to expand these deep dive episodes to encompass more about
5:03
the history of the Internet and social media.
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And as I started to look into these origins, I found that
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Myspace was way more influential in the evolution of Internet
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culture than I previously thought.
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The story of Myspace is the reason that certain platforms
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dominate the social media landscape today, shaping
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Internet culture as we know it. And as a true millennial,
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Myspace also holds a very sentimental place in my heart,
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and I was curious to know how such a powerful platform for my
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generation could crash and burn so quickly.
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The story of Myspace starts in the late 1990s with the purchase
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of the domain myspace.com. Myspace.com was initially an
5:41
online file storage site. Now, if you know anything about
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that time in Internet history, you'll know that the early 2000s
5:48
were whenthe.com bubbleburstthe.com bubble was a
5:51
stock market bubble that ballooned in the late 1990s and
5:55
reached its peak in March 2000. It was marked by the mainstream
5:58
adoption of the Internet and brought about a boom in
6:01
venturebacked.com companies. After this bubble burst in March
6:05
2000, many of the earliest Internet companies went out of
6:08
business after investment dried up and they failed to become.
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This is now referred to asthe.com Crash myspace.com.
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The file storage website was one of those that crashed amid the
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crash. A man named Krista Wolf bought
6:22
the Myspace domain to hold on to in case it became useful in the
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future. In his final year of his MBA,
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Chris took a course titled The Impact of Tech on Media and
6:30
Entertainment where he came up with the idea of Myspace for his
6:33
final class project. Chris's class project was called
6:36
Zeitgeist, which combined elements of Citysearch and
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match.com mixed with with instant messaging.
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He didn't do anything with myspace.com or action, the idea
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he came up with first class project.
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Yet in 2001, Chris and his colleague Tom Anderson Co
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founded a direct marketing company which focused on e-mail
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marketing campaigns called Response Base.
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And yes, Tom Anderson is that Tom, Chris and Tom had a ton of
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Internet experience between them, and that experience helped
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their company grow quickly. After a year they sold Response
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Base to a bigger marketing company called E Universe, now
7:13
called Intermix Media, for $3.3 million.
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Now the history of E Universe is a bit contentious.
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It was a very successful online marketing company because in its
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early days it owned a bunch of websites that were known for
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scamming users, dodgy advertising and phishing emails.
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Obviously, back then the Internet was so new and users
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were more naive, so E Universe somewhat preyed on that,
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building an e-mail list of over 20 million.
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The company's shady business practices, however, led to a
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really poor industry reputation. Nevertheless, Chris and Tom
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joined the company, and shortly after they started working on a
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project inspired by the social networking site Friendster, as
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well as Chris's MBA project. With Chris already owning the
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domain, they launched their social networking site on
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myspace.com in 2003 with E Universe as the parent company.
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E Universe's reputation, however, would plague Myspace
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for years to come. Given that Myspace was backed by
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E Universe, they had a significant advantage when it
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came to promoting the platform. Initially, Myspace's user base
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consisted primarily of E Universe employees, where the
8:18
company would hold competitions to see who could get the most
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users to join the platform. Otherwise, Myspace used E
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Universe's contacts, which as I mentioned before, consisted of
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millions of users and e-mail subscribers, to populate the
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platform with Myspace. Aligning with similar social
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platforms at the time like Friendster and Live Journal, it
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fit neatly into the cultural zeitgeist.
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But there were a couple of key reasons why Myspace soon became
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the go to social media platform. First, Myspace improved many of
8:50
the existing functions that were common on contemporary
8:53
platforms. For example, instead of only
8:55
being able to view profiles of people that you were friends
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with, you could view any profile on the platform.
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Users could also friend anyone on the website, making it easier
9:05
to expand your network than ever before.
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Part of this network was the top 8, where users could rank their
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best friends. Essentially from 1 to 8.
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Top Eight gave Myspace an element of exclusivity for its
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users and it also created a very interesting dynamic between
9:21
friends. When my friends and I got
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Myspace as mentioned in the intro, it was around 8th grade.
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Top Eight created this unspoken rule within our friend group
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that you basically had to put each other in the same position
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as each other in your top eight. So if my friend Amanda, for
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example, had me as #4 on her profile, I had to put her as #4
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as well. The only exception was if you
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had a best friend quote UN quote from childhood or outside the
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friend group like a family friend, someone like that that
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everyone knew about out it was OK if they were ahead of your
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other friends in the friend group.
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So for me, I have a best friend named Sierra who I've known
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since I was three years old before my family moved cities
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and we've stayed best friends our whole lives and we would
10:06
always visit each other every single summer.
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So my group of friends, they all knew Sierra and I knew her
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friends. So Sierra was allowed to like
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quote UN quote trump my school friends in the top eight.
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For many millennials, top eight was the first time that the
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online world really blended with real life in a way that involved
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interpersonal stakes and negotiation.
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Being able to friend anyone or view anyone's profile was
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extremely exciting for young people at the time.
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It offered users the freedom to alter their identity and connect
10:38
with anyone they desired. This also made it easier for
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aspiring celebrities to build a following, essentially creating
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the concept of an online influencer.
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Obviously, this accessibility came with its problems,
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especially because when Myspace launched, the platform didn't
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verify the e-mail addresses of those who registered.
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While this meant that fake identities proliferated the
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website, kind of like catfishing, it also allowed
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people to be whoever they wanted to be, another reason why the
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platform became so popular. Secondly, Myspace became so
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popular because the platform was extremely customizable where
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each user could adjust how their page looked.
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Users started learning code like HTML in order to personalize
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their pages, adding an additional layer of user driven
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content to the platform, research fellow Kate Miltner and
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lecturer Isabel Gerard explain quote At the crux of Myspace's
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popularity was its considerable flexibility.
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Anyone with a Myspace account could use HTML or CSS to
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customize their personal profiles in a manner
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unparalleled by contemporary social media platforms.
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This ability to edit your page actually came about by accident.
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As Julia Edwin explains, the platform's lead developer, Duk
11:51
Chow, left a month after Myspace launched.
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Chow had used the programming language Pearl to build the
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platform, but after he left, no one on the Myspace team knew how
12:00
to use it. The company started paying two
12:03
developers, Gabe Harriman and Tone Nguyen, to rebuild Myspace
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using Adobe's Coldfusion quote. While rebuilding the site,
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Harriman and Nguyen made a mistake.
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Normally, websites that accept contributions from such as text
12:17
entries or photographs, block users from inserting web markup
12:20
language such as HTML into those submissions.
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But Nuyen forgot to block web markup language in user
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submissions. Well, this mistake maybe seemed
12:30
like a major issue at first. It was significant, part of the
12:34
reason behind Myspace's success. It injected a sense of
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personality into the Internet at a time when the Internet was not
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typically used as a means to express yourself.
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Quote Suddenly, teenage girls could decorate their Myspace
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page with hearts and glitter and smiley faces the same way that
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they were decorating their lockers and book bags.
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And one goes on to note that the ability to personalize a profile
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fit with the generation of teenagers who became known as
12:57
the quote remixed generation. As creativity and
13:00
self-expression started blossoming online, teenagers
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became quote used to downloading music from the Internet and
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mashing up songs together to create remixes.
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And this brings us to our third reason for Myspaces Rise, music
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discovery. Musicians became a major part of
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Myspace's culture and Rise. The platform launched right
13:19
after mp3.com, which was a free music sharing website that many
13:24
independent artists use to promote their work.
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After mp3.com fell victim to the.com crash, artists were
13:30
looking for a place to grow, their followings and their fan
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bases. As early as 2004, artists were
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partnering with the platform. Most notably, the band R.E.M.
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Partnered with Myspace to preview its album Around the
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Sun, which was as part of Warner Records.
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Quote. When Anderson realized that
13:46
musicians were joining the site, he contacted them to ask what he
13:49
could do to support them. Cites a 2006 academic paper
13:53
titled Music as Cultural Glue, Supporting Bands and fans on
13:57
Myspace Quote In early 2004, Myspace launched music profiles
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based on the feedback that they received.
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While these profiles looked like regular Myspace users at first
14:06
glance, they offered Quote a calendar of gigs, and a mode of
14:10
music distribution. Musicians were also listed
14:13
separately on the platform, allowing for users to search for
14:16
bands directly. Further establishing Myspace as
14:19
a music discovery platform, the team later added a Flash Player
14:23
where users could stream music from their profile.
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Ultimately, Myspace helped musicians grow and musicians
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helped Myspace grow and the platform became a cultural force
14:33
and music discovery. Kind of like TikTok is today.
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Something to think about, allowing users to discover
14:40
different artists and bond over niche genres and bands.
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Myspace was really the first mainstream website that
14:46
facilitated digital community building, something that we now
14:50
know is extremely important in sustaining and growing a social
14:53
media platform. Because of these reasons,
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Myspace's rise was extremely quick.
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The platform broke 1,000,000 unique visitors per month by
15:02
June 2004, approximately 10 months after it first launched.
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Now the culture, the real impact of Myspace in its heyday cannot
15:10
be overstated. The platform had a massive
15:13
influence on the aesthetics, music and language of the time,
15:16
and we can still see a lot of this influence in both
15:19
mainstream and Internet culture today.
15:21
As I just mentioned, much of its cultural influence can be
15:25
attributed to Myspace as a music discovery platform, and this was
15:28
actually user driven, at least at first.
15:32
Arctic Monkeys is by far Myspaces most prolific musical
15:35
success story. While the band played its first
15:38
show two months before Myspace launched, it wasn't until
15:41
someone created a fan page for Arctic Monkeys on Myspace in
15:44
2003 that they really blew up. This is one of the earliest
15:48
tangible examples of fandom expression online.
15:51
After YouTube launched in 2005, Myspace made it easy to embed
15:55
YouTube links directly onto user profiles.
15:57
This solidified Myspace as the go to place for music discovery.
16:01
Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, and Grimes were all artists who were
16:04
discovered and signed to record labels thanks to Myspace.
16:08
Now there are two other important figures that came out
16:10
of Myspace. Though both of them initially
16:13
used the platform to promote their music, neither went on to
16:16
have lucrative careers as an artist.
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Instead, they actually became known as the Internets First
16:22
Influencers, and those two people are Tila Tequila and
16:26
Jeffrey Star. In the early 2000s, Tila Tequila
16:29
was a Playboy model and a singer-songwriter.
16:32
She had been using the social networking site Friendster to
16:34
help build her public profile, which was a very forward
16:37
thinking strategy for the time, but she kept getting banned for
16:41
the content that she posted. I had a hard time finding
16:44
exactly what she was posting that kept getting her banned,
16:47
but she claims that it was because of her quote, UN quote,
16:51
big personality. In 2003, Tila joined Myspace
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instead, she told Time magazine. Quote at the time, no one was on
16:58
there at all. I felt like a loser while all
17:01
the cool kids were at some other school.
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So I mass emailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them
17:07
to come over. Everybody joined overnight and
17:10
Tila had all these e-mail addresses, presumably because
17:13
she was such an early adopter to social networking sites.
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Quote, once they saw how I worked, everyone did what I did
17:20
and started promoting themselves, she told Time.
17:22
This is my job. That's how you maintain your
17:24
popularity and keep it alive. Tilas impact on the platform was
17:29
significant and her 2006 Time profile emphasized this quote.
17:33
Pre Tila, your Myspace friends were mostly people you actually
17:36
knew. Post Tila, the biggest game on
17:38
the site was who has the most friends, period.
17:41
Whoever they might be. Sadly, Tila's legacy on social
17:44
media and the career of influencing has been largely
17:47
destroyed after she publicly aligned herself with Neo Nazism.
17:51
Jeffrey Star is another problematic trailblazer in the
17:54
online world who used Myspace to launch his influencing career.
17:57
Jeffrey joined Myspace 3 months after it launched.
18:00
He used the platform like his own personal blog, sharing
18:03
details about his private life and social commentary on topics
18:06
like beauty, self-confidence, and fame.
18:08
Jeffrey's end goal was to promote his music and fashion
18:11
designer career. Like Tila, Jeffrey had built a
18:13
fan base on other websites before joining Myspace by
18:17
posting outlandish photos of himself.
18:19
And Myspace actually sent Jeffrey gifts like new cameras
18:23
to incentivize him to keep posting on Myspace because his
18:27
engagement was so high. By 2006, he was recognized as
18:30
Myspace's most connected profile, and a few years later
18:34
he reached over 1,000,000 friends again.
18:36
This was all before social media influencing was even a thing.
18:40
Tila and Jeffrey were part of this very early cohort of
18:43
aspiring celebrities who figured out that they could build fan
18:46
bases via the Internet, democratizing fame in a way that
18:50
we had never seen before. In addition to influencing the
18:53
world to join Myspace, Tila and Jeffrey were also influential in
18:57
the emergence of the Scene Queen subculture.
19:00
Born out of the platform. The term Scene Queen referred to
19:03
a group of mostly girls who skyrocketed to Myspace fame
19:07
thanks to their scene aesthetic. Some of the most iconic scene
19:11
Queens were Jack Vanek, Audrey Kitching, Hannah Beth, and
19:15
obviously Jeffrey Star. The group was known for dating
19:17
members of pop punk bands like Panic at the Disco and Fall Out
19:21
Boy. With this, the scene Queens
19:23
personal lives quickly became a point of gossip and speculation
19:26
for Myspace users. Scene Queens aesthetically were
19:29
marked by teased hair, rainbow raccoon dye jobs, and studded
19:33
belts. While this might sound similar
19:35
to emo fashion, another youth subculture that was pioneered on
19:39
Myspace, the two aesthetics were very different.
19:42
As Hattie Rex writes for Bustle Quote, the emo kids were a lot
19:45
more brooding and wore more black, whereas seamsters were
19:48
excitable little rainbows who weren't even necessarily into
19:51
the same music, let alone wardrobe choices.
19:54
While these subcultures may have had their differences, both
19:57
scene and emo emerged on Myspace as a challenge to conventional
20:01
beauty standards. That being said.
20:03
The scene was much more than an aesthetic.
20:07
With shared interests in video games and various pop punk bands
20:11
and Electro music scene Subculture built a strong sense
20:14
of community and helped like minded people find each other.
20:17
Now, I couldn't cover Myspace's cultural impact without looking
20:21
at the platform's quote UN quote coding legacy.
20:24
As previously mentioned, one of the big draws to Myspace was
20:27
that users could customize their profiles to showcase their
20:30
personality or aesthetic. Basically like an early marker
20:34
of the online personal brand, this was done through basic HTML
20:38
or CSS coding as per Code Academy quote.
20:41
Certain totems of the Myspace experience have stuck in our
20:44
collective memories, EG the top 8, auto playing music and of
20:49
course Tom. But all of the features that
20:52
made Myspace the cultural sensation that it was, the
20:54
ability to style a profile page with HTML and CSS might have
20:59
left the biggest footprint behind.
21:02
Myspace wasn't the only site at the time that allowed
21:04
customization through coding, but this feature became
21:07
Myspace's legacy because it was the most popular platform.
21:10
The Myspace coding legacy reemerged in the online
21:13
zeitgeist last year when a discussion around Gen.
21:15
ZS quote UN quote lack of tech savviness circulated on TikTok.
21:20
Many Gen. X and millennials noted that
21:22
younger generations have only known the Internet when it was
21:25
user friendly and not customizable.
21:27
Because early tech was so janky, it forced us to learn how
21:31
computer programming and software development worked, at
21:34
least at a very high level, and Myspace played a big role in
21:37
teaching these generations basic coding skills.
21:40
As Myspace's cultural influence intensified, it's no surprise
21:44
that different corporations started expressing interest in
21:46
purchasing the platform, and one of them was News Corp.
21:50
In July 2005, News Corp announced that it would be
21:53
acquiring Myspace's parent company, Intermix Media Inc, for
21:56
$580 million. According to a New York Times
22:00
article published at the time, Myspace had around 16,000,000
22:03
monthly users when it was purchased.
22:05
And for some quick math, today $580 million would be just under
22:09
$1 billion. And when we consider how much
22:12
social media platforms are worth today, that doesn't really seem
22:15
like a lot. However, this was a big move as
22:19
far as Internet history goes, because this was one of the
22:21
first times that a big corporation backed the digital
22:25
space in this way. Many businesses were skeptical
22:28
about how advertisers would make money on these sites.
22:31
But Rupert Murdoch, News Corp CEO, purchased the platform with
22:35
the intention that quote the networking site will drive
22:38
traffic to his Fox TV sites. After Murdoch purchased Myspace,
22:42
it continued to experience exponential growth and hit 100
22:46
million registered users in August 2006, a significant
22:50
milestone for the platform. According to NBC quote, in the
22:53
12 months after the News Corp acquisition, Myspace saw its
22:56
unique visitors grow by 155%. Also in August 2006, Google
23:02
signed a $900 million three-year deal to become the exclusive
23:07
provider of ads for the site. By the time Murdoch attempted to
23:12
merge Myspace with Yahoo in 2007, it was worth $12 billion.
23:17
The inception and rise of Myspace was impressive, but
23:20
sitting here in 2024, I haven't used Myspace in nearly 15 years
23:25
and chances are neither have you.
23:27
So what happened? How did the most prolific social
23:31
networking site of the early 2000s become totally obsolete?
23:37
There are a couple of major reasons behind the downfall of
23:40
Myspace. Firstly, News Corp was a major
23:43
contributor to Myspace's decline.
23:45
This is largely because the culture changed when a major
23:48
media company got on board. Now that Myspace had backing
23:51
from a major organization, things became very corporate and
23:55
over bureaucratic, ultimately changing the culture of the
23:58
platform. For sample, the deal with Google
24:01
posed a long term challenges. This deal compelled Myspace to
24:04
increase the number of ads on its already saturated platform.
24:08
In turn, it restricted Myspace's ability to experiment with user
24:12
experience as any changes could potentially compromise revenue
24:16
streams, a former Myspace executive close to advertising
24:19
sales told NBC News. Quote, it was a good deal in the
24:22
short term, but in the long term it ended up being not so good.
24:26
We were incentivized to keep page views very high and ended
24:29
up having too many ads plus too many pages, making the site less
24:32
easy than a site like Facebook. In the years since, Murdoch has
24:36
discussed the failure of Myspace, placing the blame on
24:39
himself. Quote this was just ahead of
24:41
Facebook, and Myspace was just about to start a video service
24:45
where we would have been three months ahead of YouTube, he told
24:47
Sarah Ashley O'Brien for CNN. But we took bad advice.
24:51
We put in a layer of bureaucracy, Murdoch continued,
24:54
by saying that News Corp should have, quote, had faith in
24:57
Myspace's existing management or replaced it.
25:00
The problems that Myspace was facing internally were
25:02
intensified as Facebook originally named the Facebook
25:06
arrived on the scene. Ironically, Myspace founders
25:10
actually met with Mark Zuckerberg, who offered to sell
25:13
them Facebook for $75 million in 2004, but they didn't take it.
25:18
For a time, young people were using both platforms, with
25:21
Myspace being the most popular among the social media
25:24
platforms. But the first signs of Myspace's
25:27
decline were in April 2008, when Facebook overtook the platform
25:31
in unique monthly visitors. At first, a major difference
25:35
between the platforms was that Facebook was only available to
25:38
college students. Interestingly, Research fellow
25:41
Kate Miltner and lecturer Isabel Gerard point to Danna Boyd's
25:45
research on why Facebook overtook Myspace in popularity,
25:50
and a lot of it has to do with racism.
25:53
Quote Facebook and Myspace users became divided along racial
25:56
lines, with white teens feeling that Myspace became dominated by
26:00
what they saw as subcultural music tastes.
26:03
The earliest Facebook adopters also had to havea.edu e-mail
26:08
address to register with the site, making it a marker of
26:11
quote status and maturity for teens, further heightening its
26:14
appeal. While white teens dominated
26:16
Myspace at the height of its popularity, Facebook's then
26:19
reputation as a more mainstream platform meant Myspace became
26:24
increasingly valuable to minoritized teens.
26:27
Myspace's demise sits within a broader quote, gentrification of
26:32
the Internet. Beyond this, Facebook was just
26:35
less glitchy, making the user experience better.
26:38
Myspace's customization meant the platform had a lot of
26:41
technical problems. This manifested in slow load
26:45
times and extremely laggy profiles.
26:48
Facebook, by contrast, was consistently updating features
26:52
and the site interface, which was exciting for users.
26:55
According to the Los Angeles Times quote.
26:57
Some observers say Myspace clung too long to a portal strategy in
27:01
which it sought to amass an audience around entertainment
27:04
content. By contrast, Facebook maintained
27:07
its focus on features that enhance the social networking
27:10
experience, such as the News Feed.
27:12
Myspace did try to copy some of Facebook's features, but they
27:16
were just so much worse than the Facebook product itself, and
27:19
that further alienated Myspace users.
27:21
It soon became clear just how much Myspace was struggling as
27:25
the numbers of users fell and the company was forced to cut
27:28
costs. Eventually, Myspace had to lay
27:30
off a significant amount of staff.
27:32
Quote Myspace on Tuesday said it was laying off 420 people,
27:36
nearly one out of three employees, as part of an
27:39
aggressive restructuring that seeks to make the company
27:42
smaller and more agile. The action follows a management
27:45
shake up in April in which Myspace founder Crystal Wolf was
27:48
replaced with chief executive by Facebook's former chief
27:51
operating officer Owen Vanetta, writes the Los Angeles Times.
27:55
Lastly, Myspace consistently had a reputation problem.
28:00
Remember at the top of the episode when I discussed the
28:02
shady business practices of Myspace's first parent company,
28:05
E Universe? Well, Myspace's early
28:08
association with E Universe had plagued their reputation across
28:11
the tech and media industries. As the platform grew, Myspace
28:15
continued to face reputation issues, especially amongst
28:18
users. Given the fact that many users
28:20
on Myspace were going by pseudonyms and not their real
28:23
name, while many users chose to go by a pseudonym out of fear,
28:27
it made the platform increasingly dangerous for young
28:29
people and furthered this negative reputation.
28:33
Mike Jones, the former head of Myspace, explained that the fact
28:36
that Facebook forced people to use their real names paved the
28:39
way for their success. Quote Facebooks killer feature
28:43
was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use
28:46
their real names, whereas Myspace users used handles, says
28:50
Jones. The real problem was that the
28:52
world had been trained by Myspace, that social networking
28:55
was interesting, but the actual product had been perfected by
28:59
Facebook. After years of declining users
29:02
and technical difficulties, News Corp sold Myspace to advertising
29:06
companies Specific Media for around $35 million in 2011, a
29:12
far cry from the asking price of $100 million.
29:16
Myspace and its parent company were later bought by Time Inc
29:19
and subsequently the Meredith Corporation.
29:22
The story of Myspace ends in 2019 when reports emerged that
29:26
the site had lost all of its content uploaded to Myspace
29:30
prior to 2016, the platform cited A faulty server migration
29:34
and claimed it happened sometime around 2018.
29:37
This resulted in the loss of over 50 million tracks from
29:41
14,000,000 artists and millions of user profiles and photos.
29:45
The Myspace data loss feels like closure in a way, a symbolic
29:49
ending to the early days of social networking and the
29:52
millennial youth culture that dominated it.
29:54
Though the archives may be lost forever, Myspace's impact on
29:58
Internet culture and technology has lived on the platform, paved
30:02
the way for so many elements of the online world that exists
30:05
today, and gave us the millennial generation years of
30:09
memories that honestly we have probably mostly forgotten.
30:13
And when I think back to my 13 year old self posting, who knows
30:17
what on myspace.com from the desktop PC in my families
30:22
designated computer room. Those memories are probably
30:26
best. Forgotten Infinite Scroll is a
30:28
podcast written, produced and presented by me, Lauren Meisner,
30:32
for Centennial World. Additional research and
30:34
reporting is by Annabelle Ben David.
30:37
Editing is by Danny Fennick. Thank you so much for listening.
30:40
I love you guys so much. And I will talk to you guys next
30:43
week. Bye.