In a new book, former MySpace executives tell the inside story of how Murdoch bought the social media site at its zenith and then proceeded to ruin it.
In 2003, UCLA dropout and former punk singer Tom Anderson and marketing executive Chris DeWolfe co-founded MySpace, the best social media website ever. By 2005, MySpace had overcome Google to become the most popular website in the world, and was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million.
In retrospect, it seemed like a way to remind people that while Facebook may have been less chaotic, it also had much less personality. The new, cleaned-up feed got rid of the old “a place for friends” logo and operated on a grid system that made it easier to share and organize your favs. It was also easier to sync up with your Twitter and Facebook accounts and for artists to install third-party applications such as the fundraising tool Pledge Music.
Specific Media was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris, and Russell Vanderhook, from Irvine, California. The company originally sold advertising space for websites. It later moved into harvesting users’ browsing history, demographic data, and other unique information for targeted advertising. Specific wasn’t a well-known company, so the Van- derhook brothers decided to bring in some high-profile help. They also laid off half of the remaining five hundred employees.
SARAH JOYCE : Everyone who was a MySpace Music person was like, “Can we just become our own thing?” And our only focus was artist tools and connecting artists and fans and just maybe selling merch and tickets and continuing to evolve that product and stay very narrow on that. If they were iterating with that in mind and said, “Let’s cut the crap. We’ve lost the social element of this. We don’t need a TV vertical.
JOYCE: The hardest thing to do is say no. I’d argue they were the first Internet social company to achieve that level. It was phenomenal. I remember being at Comcast before Fox bought it, and I remember telling my boss, “Oh, we should buy MySpace.” There was no precedent for that kind of level of explosive growth from both the culture and actual business numbers, driving traffic and being the first of its kind. So they said yes to everything. They lost their way.
JOYCE: We had two CEOs, and one came from a content entertainment background, the other one came from a tech background. A lot of money, a lot of ego. No one had really had a clear direction. And you got to move before the world moves.
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