Member Since: 5/10/2012
Posts: 10,996
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Quote:
The story of MySpace's rise, fall, and (so far failed) resurrection is a kind of case study for internet companies. In 2006, three years after it launched, MySpace became the most visited site in the US by some metrics, and it became known as a launching pad for musicians after artists like Calvin Harris, the Arctic Monkeys, and Lilly Allen got IRL famous after attracting attention on the social network. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace for a then-eye-watering $580 million. Everyone knows what happened next: Users migrated to Facebook en masse, MySpace's aesthetic became regarded as ugly and cluttered. In 2011, Murdoch unloaded the site for $35 million, describing his decision to buy (and then hang onto) MySpace as a "huge mistake."
By then, the site was a punchline as well as a lesson in how quickly a site could become irrelevant. But today it embodies another aspect of online business culture: eternal optimism. The people currently in charge of the site imagine that with a little luck it could return to its current glory, even if no one else thinks so.
"We were trying to be everything to everybody, and we just stopped innovating," Linh Chung, who joined MySpace in 2007 as senior vice president of tech operations, told VICE of the site's downward slide. "That was the main reason we fell from grace."
In 2013, the site, now owned by Justin Timberlake and Tim Vanderhook's Specific Media Group, relaunched. Specific Media, which is part of Viant, is known for being a pioneer in the field of behavioural-tracking technologies, which underpin most online advertising. Featuring a sleek new design and surrounded by a whirlwind of publicity and TV advertisements, MySpace 2.0 drew 31 million unique visitors to the site in two weeks, though many of those people might have been drawn in by the site's premiere of Timberlake's first single in seven years.
Many old MySpace features like private messaging and customizable background designs had been dropped. The idea was to pivot into being more focused on music, along the lines of Pandora, Spotify, and even Pitchfork. It didn't take long before pretty much everyone considered the new MySpace to be a bust. Today, the site looks like just another content portal filled with listicles and aggregation. User can log in through their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and Vevo supplies most of the featured music videos.
But the punchline is that rather than fading away, MySpace is doing better than ever, according to some numbers. In 2014, its traffic grew more than 400 percent, hitting nearly 30 million unique visitors in December. And Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook is talking about a comeback.
"During the past four years, the total number of users ever to be registered on MySpace crossed 1 billion, which is something very few platforms have achieved," Vanderhook told VICE. "Because of that, we've felt the site has far more longevity than people believe."
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More in the link below:
https://www.vice.com/read/will-myspa...ource=vicefbusp
Hmmm, thoughts?
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Everyone has already moved on. The task of getting people to come back is not going to be an easy one, as shown so far. The numbers may be better than before but that's because they were legitimately at rock bottom for the past few years. Now whenever MySpace is mentioned it's mostly in a joking manner, like ha reputation is soiled now.
