MySpace was the biggest social network on Earth — then Facebook passed it and it collapsed

MySpace, founded in 2003, was the dominant social networking site of the mid-2000s. In 2006 it was the most visited website in the United States, and in 2005 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp had bought it for $580 million, a bet that social networking was the future of media. For a few years, MySpace seemed unstoppable — the place where people, especially musicians and young people, built their online identities.

Then Facebook rose. MySpace failed to innovate and to keep its product clean and reliable; it became cluttered with ads, plagued by spam and technical problems, and slow to improve. Facebook, with a cleaner design and a focus on real identities and the news feed, attracted users away in droves. By 2008 Facebook had overtaken MySpace in traffic, and the decline accelerated.

The fall was steep. In 2011, News Corp sold MySpace for about $35 million — a small fraction of what it had paid six years earlier. MySpace had gone from the most visited site in America to a has-been in a handful of years. (In 2019 it emerged that a server migration had permanently lost much of the music and photos users had uploaded between 2003 and 2015.) MySpace became the canonical example of how fast a dominant platform can fall when it stops serving its users.